In the same way that both product and process, literature
and composition, create a modern, individual subjectivity, both linear
and network metaphors and physical configurations create the same individuality.
Even though computer classrooms provide a new type of (virtual) community,
this community's abstract status takes students out their most immediate
social environment of the classroom. They are so structured by television
culture that they are trained to focus in on the monitor. Steven Best,
in his essay "Robocop and the Crisis of Subjectivity," theorizes this phenomena
as the "technological dialectic of postmodernity." Here McLuhan's notion
of the exteriorization of the human senses via technology gets inverted.
Through the "invisible merger of technology and biology, in the loss of
a substantial distance between the body and its technological extensions,
in the integration of the body into Sony Walkmans, IBM computers screens,
and the semiotic surfeit of consumer capital" the tables turn [$].
Rather than being an extension of our sensorium, we are sucked into a technological
context where "the human being becomes a 'servo-mechanism'" in/of the technological
field. Rather than having the autonomous reader shut off from the world
within a book, we are sucked into the medium of computer technology. The
computer simply replaces the book as our primary mode of subjectivation.
|