#3.

Lanham, Richard. "The Electric Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution." New Literary History. Vol. 20, No. 2, Technology, Models, and Literary Study (Winter, 1989), pp. 265-290.

Slatin, John. "Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium." College English. Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 870-883.

Cooper, Marilyn M. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." College English, Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 847-869.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 55-65.

Other than the fact that all of these articles deal with technology and the way that we, as teachers, and as humans, interact with it, I found a few interesting connections, which I've listed below. (Also, was I the only one who kept wanting to call Slatin "Stalin"?)

• Technology is a tool, and that it has both flaws and major perks. Selfe and Hawisher express this sentiment quite well within their article, “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class,” arguing, “we can no longer afford to simply, and only, to dwell on the best parts, to tell stories about the best classroom moments, and to feature the more positive findings about computers. Rather, we must begin to identify the ways in which technology can fail us” (61). Lanham’s analysis of dated technology in the form of the textbooks student use in high school echoes this sentiment; he writes, “these volumes—physically ugly, worn out… bound in vile peanut-butter-sandwich-proof pyroxeline covers…written in a prose style intentionally dumbed down…do a terrific job of teaching students to hate reading” (271). He also notes that “digitization both desubstantiates a work of art and subjects it to a perpetual immanent metamorphosis from one sense-dimension to another” (273). Slatin addresses this issue through looking at the hidden dangers within hypertexts, referencing Jeff Conklin as he states, “because the hyperdocument contains so much material, and because relations between the components…are not always spelled out, there is a significant danger that the reader will get lost or become badly disoriented” (Slatin 875). Finally, both of Selfe’s articles, written separately with Hawisher and Cooper, address the “social and political dangers that the use of computers may pose” (Hawisher and Selfe 56)

 

• Within Cooper and Selfe’s article, “Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse,” they make the comment that “education, even as it empowers students with new knowledge and the ability to operate successfully within academic discourse communities, also oppresses them, dictating a specific set of values and beliefs along with appropriate forms of behavior” (850). I feel that this is comparable to Slatin’s analysis of how linear books are read. Slatin argues, “the reader is expected to begin at a clearly parked point whose appropriateness has been determined by the author…and to proceed from that beginning to an ending which is just as clearly marked and which has also been determined by the author in accordance with his or her understanding of the subject matter and the reader” (871). In this way, the students in an education empowering them with new knowledge while simultaneously oppressing them are similar to the students/humans/chimps reading linear books that empower them with new knowledge while simultaneously stripping them of agency.

• Slatin and Lanham both urge online publications, but for seemingly different reasons. Lanham thinks that by switching to an online forum, “the whole censorial process by which our efforts are judged ‘worthy of publication’ might change as the meaning of ‘publication’ changed” and cites an “80-90 percent” rejection rate for the social sciences and humanities, while Slatin states that switching to an online medium would cut costs, writing, “text is always mutable, always subject to inadvertent error and deliberate charge, and it has to be coerced into standing still. That’s why publishers charge you money if you make too many changes in a text after it’s been typeset”( Lanham 284, Slatin 872).

I feel that much of what these scholars were concerned with in the 1980s and 1990s is still very applicable today. For instance, Lanham poses apt concerns regarding the protection of intellectual property, determining what is “new”, and navigating co-authorship/property ownership that we’re still dealing with today, especially in terms of every new technological invention and the freedom to create that it gives us. Slatin voices his concern about the construction of hypertexts and balancing the need for readers to be able to predict things about hyperdocuments without giving up the author’s ability to shock them, for “there can be no information without surprise” (873). With so many multimodal scholarly journals, Slatin’s concern is clearly still very relevant. And as for both of Selfe’s articles? I don’t think there will ever be a time where good teachers aren’t worried about power dynamics in the classroom.