ABSTRACT
Despite the relatively short history of computing in the humanities, the ideas and concepts grounding it have undergone significant changes.1 A new pedagogy that once seemed to promise a more democratic space for students to discuss ideas and that hoped to prepare them to take their place in a more complex and technologically literate workforce is now one that questions the extent to which emerging classroom technologies can deliver on earlier promises. Indeed, the proliferation of computers in composition and other humanities classrooms has meant, for some, a revolution in the way writing is taught; the way information is disseminated and accessed; and the way such technologies have introduced and made possible a new dimension of equality, access, and democratic participation. The scholarly literature of the late 1980s and early 1990s on networked instruction, for example, has promulgated various claims, such as this one: “Once people have electronic access, their status, power, and prestige are communicated neither con-
textually . . . nor dynamically. . . . Thus, charismatic and high status people may have less influence, and group members may participate more equally in computer communication” (Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984, in Hawisher & Selfe, 1991b, p. 57). Along similar lines, others posited that computer-mediated composition makes possible an “egalitarian discourse” (Day & Batson, 1993, p. 34) and a “strong sense of community” not characteristic of a traditional classroom (Hawisher, 1992, p. 87). The implicit and explicit arguments made here are symptomatic of a rhetoric that has influenced not only our thinking about the way we deploy technology in the classroom but also the way that we fail to think critically about it. That is, these claims have invited us to consider computer-mediated instruction as a democratic space where students may temporarily forget their (unequal) race, gender, or socioeconomic status as they participate in an electronic environment. This democratic rhetoric has informed what Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe (1991b) call “the rhetoric of technology” (p. 56)—an uncritical discourse that sees computers as positive ends in themselves, where “hope, vision, and persuasion” (p. 57) characterize the scholarship in the field.
