Wizards, Wired Women, Historians, Contrarians, Eulogizers, and
Other Online Personae
by John
F. Barber
Wizards
Most of us who use the Internet daily do so with the thought that it has always
existed. But little more than 25 years ago, the Internet existed only in the
minds of the computer scientists and engineers who were working to create a
way to link computers across the country. The computer network they developed
became one of the most important technological breakthroughs of our time and
transformed communications as radically as did radio, telephone, and
television. It also provided an arena for daily interaction with others. This
is the subject of Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book Where Wizards Stay Up
Late: The Origins of the Internet. Hafner and Lyon tell the story of
young computer whizzes who invented the basis of a digital world which many of
us consider every bit as fundamental as the earth, air, fire, and water basis
of our physical world.
The story that Hafner and Lyons do not tell is how the Internet, in its short
history, has, with other iterations of computer technology, created a digital
cultural context within which we are examining our notions of literacy, gender,
identity, and interaction. Other authors have taken on these subjects,
producing a broad range of papertext books and journal articles. We feel that
there is much to be learned from these papertexts and with this issue we are
proud to inaugurate a new section of hypertextual
reviews of papertexts written by our readers.
Contrarians
The collection of reviews featured here is broad and illuminating. For
example, reviewing Steven Talbott's book, The Future Does Not Compute:
Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, Joshua L. Farber says Talbott
threads a line between the optimism of cyberpromoters and netizens and the
doomsday predictions of critics who blame technology for the loss of personal
connection and interaction in human life and fear government of big business
control or abuse. Of special interest to readers, says Farber, is Talbott's
examination of the electronic word and his condemnation of the ways in which we
allow computer technology paradigms to change how we think.
Wired Women
One of these changes might be how we think of our interactions with others in
local, physical neighborhoods. Nick Carbone, reviewing The Wired Neighborhood
by Stephen Doheny-Farina, calls it a thoughtful contrarian argument about how
to respond to the evolution of computer technology and connectivity.
Doheny-Farina's central argument, says Carbone, is that in connecting everyone,
computer networks further isolate us by abstracting us from place and
virtualizing human relations. The solution: we must make the effort to change
our thinking from global to local and work to develop computer technology that
will promote and maintain wired neighborhoods that benefit the communal
experiences made rich by the particular physical locations in which they
occur.
This may be more easily said than done according to Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth
Reba Weise who examine the fact that we seem to port many of our real life
prejudices and stereotypes unchanged into cyberspace. Entitled Wired Women:
Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, their book is a collection of
stories of women's experiences with the Internet. Many of these stories,
according to reviewer Robin A. Morris,
have to do with online harassment. Her review concludes that since the
Internet was built by and for men we will have to work to create safe spaces
within this patriarchal structure. The ability to connect with other women via
the Internet, to become wired, concludes Morris, helps to further women's
agendas. Reviewing the same book, Marcy Bauman says it portrays
life in cyberspace as nuanced, complex, and interesting, while providing
thoughtful reflections on being a woman on the Internet. Bauman's review asks
rhetorically "What does it mean to inhabit a female body in the physical world,
with all the world's familiar freedoms and restrictions, and also to be freed
from these restrictions and subject to new constraints in cyberspace? Does the
medium lend itself to the weakening of personal boundaries?"
Online Personae
The Internet's ability to weaken personal boundaries, encourage the production
of new forms of self-identity, and promote interaction in virtual communities
has long been an interest of Sherry Turkle. Reviewing Turkle's newest book, Life on the Screen:
Identity in the Age of the Internet, Cynthia Haynes says the abilities
provided by the Internet for students to create new forms of self and new forms
of interaction are forcing writing teachers to learn more about these new
contexts in order to keep pace with the demystification of knowledge their
students face both in and out of the classroom. As a result, Haynes' review
concludes that gazing into our computer screens we may well find ourselves in
one of most significant sites of struggle for a sense of self identity.
Eulogizers
A growing dependence on computer-based communication is forcing us to not only
reexamine our self-identity, but also our notions of literacy, specifically the
primacy of the print-based book. Is the book doomed? Or will it evolve to
encompass digital insertions? In a review of The Future of the Book, a
collection of essays edited by Geoffrey Nunberg, Lee Honeycutt concludes that
the book will survive, but probably in a much changed form, one that includes
CD-ROM insertions, for example. Honeycutt says the essays in this book point
to the necessity for changing notions of literacy to encompass various media
while excluding none. The printed word, he says, will be part of the mix for
many years to come.
This may be good news for the avid reader, but Sven Birkerts is still worried
about the apparent demise of reading. Reviewing Birkerts' book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The
Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Susan Lewis-Wallace says Birkerts views the
increase in technology as detrimental to our acquisition of knowledge.
Learning takes time, says Birkerts, time to accumulate and reflect on
information, and then more time to synthesize this information in order to make
meaning of one's life. The advent of nearly instantaneous electronic
communications erases this time for reflection by demanding immediate response.
Wallace concludes that we must continue to value reading and reflection as ways
to enjoy life.
Reading and reflection and writing in response to either or both is also a way
to learn. But teachers wishing to focus class activities and assignments on
the transition between traditional print and online cultures have had only few
textbooks to choose from. Two new books are changing this scenario. First,
there is Julie Bates Docks's The Press of
Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age.
Reviewer Bob Whipple calls it a good candidate for writing classes exploring
the impact of technology on the history and future of personal and cultural
literacies. The second is Victor Vitanza's CyberReader. Bob Timm says
the greatest strength of CyberReader, with its accompanying WWW site,
may be its yet unrealized potential possibilities to correlate and present
issues confronted by students in their general use of computers and cyberspace.
The articles collected in this anthology range from the theoretical concepts of
hyperreality to practical topics like hacking, gender, and censorship. Timm
concludes that papertexts like CyberReader are a necessary medium for
introducing tentative student writers to cyberspace.
Historians
Another useful book, especially for providing teachers with valuable
background, is Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher
Education, 1979-1994: A History by Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles
Moran, and Cynthia Selfe. Susan Halter says this
papertext reads less like a history than a whole research library as it
incorporates scholarship, political, social, personal, and economic narratives,
interview transcripts, even a transcript of a MOO session. Halter sees this
papertext spiraling back over itself again and again in a hypertextual-like
context similar to William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! in which
the characters tell and retell the same story over and over again, sometimes to
each other, sometimes with each other but always within the author's caveat
that what is being created is probably true enough.
Kip Strasma agrees with
Halter that Hawisher, Leblanc, Moran, and Selfe's book can be read as a novel.
It can also be read, Strasma says, as hypertext, as a Computers and
Composition narrative, as an annotated bibliography, as science fiction, as
a journal, and as a textbook. The end result is that while not comprehensive,
Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education,
1979-1994: A History presents an account of key persons, publications, and
practices responsible for making the field of computers and composition what it
is today.
In his review, Ted
Nellen applauds this presentation of what, until now, has been largely a
folk or oral history. Nellen says Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe have
produced a celebration of teachers exploring new ways to use new technology to
facilitate the teaching of writing. The textual representation of this history
through numerous sidebars and personal accounts, provides, says Nellen, a sense
of the communal commraderie and hypertextually webbed context of the computers
and writing arena.
However, according to reviewer Joan Latchaw, a similar approach does not work
as well in Joan Tornow's Link/Age: Composing in the
Online Classroom. Where the pseudohypertextual links in Computers and
the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History
provide a sense of context, they tend to create a sense of disjointed textual
exploration of multiple subjects in Tornow's book, says Latchaw. Despite the
broad range of subject matter---science, philosophy, critical theory, and
composition---and narrative qualities --ethnography, theoretical, and
analytical---the net result is disjointed and lacking in coherent structure.
This disjointedness, however, may be its promise, suggests Latchaw, when she
says the book, because it raises more questions than it answers, may be
kindling for further research. Despite its weaknesses, Latchaw concludes,
Tornow's book in worth exploring, especially by teachers integrating computer
technology into their writing classrooms.
Conclusions
The common theme running through these reviews is the impact of computer
technology on our notions of writing, self, and community. These papertexts
represent serious investigations of the implications arising from our embracing
computer technology as a way to facilitate self-discovery and social
interaction. They provide useful guidelines for those of us teaching and
learning in webbed environments. As there is much to learn from these reviews
and the papertexts they connect to, we envision that these reviews and others
that will follow in subsequent issues of Kairos will remain perpetually
available to students, teachers, researchers, and other readers as part of a
constantly growing, evolving, and interactive bibliographic database. We
welcome your participation and invite you to submit a
papertext review.
COMMENTS
Dr. John F. Barber
Department of Language and Communication
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
jfbarber@alpha.nsula.edu
Respond to Kairos Interactive