Computers

Who Computes Now?

preterite Class (Meta), Computers, Economics

So we’re supposed to have our first frost tonight and I brought the plants in and within two minutes the girls were chewing on them. Well, it’s not like I didn’t expect it.

Had a decent albeit long teaching day today. My lesson plan was a bit innovative, trying something new with peer response oriented towards structural revision on early drafts, and as such, it was also a bit of a failure. Still, despite its failure, students wrote, and I learned. I’ll know how to do it better next time, and it’s a nice new exercise that seems simple and powerful enough to try again.

Anyway: I’m asking for help here. What follows is a really rough, early attempt at a draft of a 300- to 500-word conference presentation proposal; said presentation being something I’m also hoping to work into an essay for publication. I’d be most grateful for any ruthless critical feedback on the proposal, particularly suggestions about what to do with the really unfocused latter section, as well as suggestions about how to make the language less dense while still trying to maintain whatever analytical rigor it might possess. So here goes.
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One More Thing, Mr. Kerr

preterite Computers, Teaching

Some final thoughts from Kerr tonight — it’s been a long night, and I should’ve been in bed long ago, but I’ve been struggling with various technology issues for my two sections tomorrow. Which is somehow appropriate, since the stuff from Kerr is about technology.

Kerr argues that “The best of the liberal arts colleges are likely to be the least affected by the new electronic technology since they are mostly engaged in the all-around development of the children of the already affluent (the top one-fifth of the economic scale), providing sports, lifetime friends, social skills, programs for cultural interests, and all-around intellectual advancement, not just job skills. These institutions get their main support from gifts by affluent alumni who have the ability and willingness to pay high tuitions for their children, not from public funds” (224). But those of us who have visited computer labs in wealthy private institutions and compared them to the computer labs at the less wealthy public institutions where we teach know quite well that “the best of the liberal arts colleges” also have more, better computers per student, and because their students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, those students often possess a higher level of familarity and proficiency with computers, and also often know how to do different sorts of work with computers. The divisions Jean Anyon points to in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” apply very much to the use of computers in elementary and secondary education: students in poorer schools are often given drills-and-skills instruction while students in wealthier schools get to do the fancy stuff.
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Cultural Theory and the Web

preterite Computers

I did a quick burn tonight through the several chapters in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), that seemed like they might be useful. Not much that was new, really, but one semi-startling connection that I’ll save until last.
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Jameson on Computers

preterite Class (Marxian), Computers

I finished Jameson today, running through the big first portion and several other chapters of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as well as a skim of the conclusion.

Jameson offers some useful (and occasionally familiar) ideas. One big point is that reification — the conversion of social relations into things — has become second nature to us. This has been a theme of The Baffler since its very first issue (as manifested in the tongue-in-cheek slogan, “Commodify your dissent!”), but it’s also something I need to keep in mind if I’m going to be asking first-year writing students about social class. Other familiar stuff: I really liked the definition of postmodernism as “the consumption of sheer commodification as process” (x).
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Olson: Who Computes?

preterite Computers, Economics, Writing

C. Paul Olson’s 1987 essay “Who Computes?” seems to gain more depth each time I read it. It’s not that the essay is changing, but more like what Samuel Clemens was talking about when he quipped, “The older I get, the smarter my Dad gets.” I’ve learned a little more since the two times I read it before taking my exams several months ago, and several months ago I’d read a little more widely in computers and composition than I had when I first encountered the essay in Charlie Moran’s “Writing and Emerging Technologies” seminar a couple years ago. The essay’s so central to what I’ve been talking about with computers and economy and education that I wish I could just reproduce the whole thing right here, but since that won’t work, I figure I’ll just talk about it a little. And, even though I’ve got all these fine things to say, that doesn’t mean I find the essay entirely non-problematic.
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Financial & Cybernetic Abstractions

preterite Computers

In “Base and Superstructure”, Jameson offers the familiar caveat that “Characterizations of late capitalism in terms of information or cybernetics. . . need to be recoupled with the economic dynamics from which they tend rather easily to be severed, rhetorically, intellectually, and ideologically” (166). Nothing new here except in the specificity of those three concluding dimensions, which suggests to me that it would be useful for me to figure out the dimensions of technological evangelism with which I have difficulties. Jameson also points out that capitalism adapts to new circumstances by (1) expanding its system (as we’ve seen with the expansion from Britain to the U.S. to the incorporation of powers such as Japan and lately to the global economy, which of course makes me ask where capitalism might next expand) and (2) producing radically new types of commodities (how much does TypePad cost again?); the latest stage of capitalism, Jameson argues (following Giovanni Arrighi) in “Culture and Finance Capital” and “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism”, is finance capitalism: “Giovanni Arrighi has shown that the various moments of capital all seem to know a final stage in which production passes over into speculation, in which value parts from its origin in production and is exchanged more abstractly” (“Five Theses” 169). Finance capital is, according to Jameson, a characteristically more abstracted form of capitalism, and here I see an interesting connection to the relation set up in that first quotation, above, between late capitalism and cybernetics, because Jameson in “Culture and Finance Capital” makes reference to “the abstractions brought. . . by cybernetic technology” (261).
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Historicism and Materiality

preterite Computers, Culture, Economics

Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, in their “Introduction” to The Jameson Reader, point to the uneasy intersection of discussions of literature and culture with discussions “of economic and social structures” (1) in Jameson’s work. While a lot of the work that’s been derived from Jameson’s writing makes me incredibly impatient (it seems to me a fine example of what the Tutor has lambasted as the spineless equivocations of postmodern theory), some of Jameson’s ideas are useful, and seem germane to what I’m looking at.
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Instrumentality and Economies

preterite Computers, Economics, Education

Tink is one of the two kittens I adopted a few weeks ago (she’s the orange one; her sister, Zeugma, is the tortie), and I’m kinda worried about her: she’s got something wrong with her left eye so she’s squinting with it a lot of the time. The vet gave me some terramycin ointment to put in her eye three times a day, which she doesn’t like much, and I’m impatient — after three days, yes, I know, not long — for her to get better. She and Zeugma play rough, but she — Tink — is very much the hesitant, shy, and klutzy one, so much so that I wondered if she might be deaf when I first adopted her. (Easy to test. Nope.) So I worry — I mean, it’s totally obvious to me what kind of gut-level emotional needs are being fulfilled: my mom died of ALS last September, Christa and I broke up after four years this Spring, and she moved out and took the two cats she and I had adopted with her — and, yeah, I’m kind of overinvested in these two.

Anyway, I finished Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe’s History today, and also checked out Hawisher and Selfe’s February 1991 College Composition and Communication essay, “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class” (CCC Vol. 42, No. 1). Not much new in the History from what I talked about yesterday, save the concession that “By the advent of the 1990s, it had become clear to computers and composition specialists that technology would not automatically increase the opportunities for the democratic participation of less privileged segments of our society” (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe 257). This assertion, while one familiar to me and one that forms a part of my own ideology, seems to not go far enough; what I’m looking at in this dissertation are some of the possible ways in which the technological components of economies of writing and education may shut down opportunities and reproduce inequalities.
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Mechanisms for Forgetting

preterite Computers, Economics

To follow up from yesterday’s post: the Phaedrus reminds us that writing once was new, that it was a technology with unexamined potential. But as Socrates warned, it’s become a mechanism for forgetting; we forgot even his warning. Writing instructors came to view writing as transcendent, as something separable from debates about correctness, assessment, separable from history and context. But we’re better than that now, of course; as the narrative goes, we’ve remembered again, and reshaped our views to account for an understanding of writing as always grounded in contexts.

And as we’ve done so, something else has slipped away. Now it’s technology that is magical, polymorphous, transcendent, because in the discourse of writing and technology it’s always separable from context. Writing, in Plato’s time, was a technology, and a mechanism for forgetting: now, technologies for writing have themselves become such acontextualized mechanisms for forgetting.
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History, Technology, Phaedrus

preterite Computers

After last night, it feels as if I’ve momentarily wiped all the economic and sociological perspectives from my mind for a while. I know that for me and for a lot of other folks, this is pretty common practice; one gets so wrapped up in a perspective that putting it on the back-brain to bubble necessitates entirely wiping it from the front-brain for a bit. So, tonight, some initial notes on Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History, by Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996).
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