Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Selfe and Selfe, "The Politics of the Interface"
S elfe, Cindy, and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. " The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." CCC 45.4 (1994): 480-503.
Selfe and Selfe set out to establish the political dimensions of the computer interface and to recommend practical action steps for teachers of English. The adopt two prevailing metaphors: "mapping" from Denis Wood's The Power of Maps (1992) and "contact zones" from Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zones" (1991). After opening with a brief anecdote representative of racism at the Mexican border, Selfe and Selfe correlate computers and interfaces specifically to a kind of borderland infused with "the effects of domination and colonialism" (2). To understand interfaces as "complex political landscapes" (2), we must first recognize them as educational spaces (ideologically imbued; as consequential in what they reveal as what they conceal or fail to display) and then we must read them critically as maps of 1.) capitalism and class privilege (desktop, white pointer hand, default icons); 2.) discursive privilege (Standard English in spellchecker and OSes, devaluation of linguistic diversity, ASCII limitations); 3.) rationalism and lagocentric privilege (hierarchical; formal, propositional logic). The critique doesn't seem to account for trends toward customizable web browsers (this, evidence of the times in which it was written). It also seems oriented toward single-user interface encounters that are not networked beyond a hardware/infrastructural connotation of the term. In answer to the third point of criticism, they recommend the figure of the bricoleur as one who makes do and re-shuffles materials following intuition more than hierarchical schemes.
As for practical action steps, Selfe and Selfe contend that we must begin with recognizing these borders (the design orientations and political infused-ness of the interface) and also that we "need to teach students and ourselves useful strategies of crossing--and demystifying--these borders" (10). Specifically, they recommend 1.) becoming critics as well as users (never mere users); 2.) contributing to technology design (especially for faculty who are experts in computers and composition); and 3.) involving interfaces as texts (subject to critique and revision) in the composition classroom. To a degree, this becomes a critical reading project, but it's not clear that students in 1994 would have had the means to create interfaces themselves (in other words, there's little here about designing interfaces as a composition project, although designing culturally just icons is mentioned (13)).
I. Computers as Learning Environments: History and Motivation
II. Mapping the Interface of Computers as Educational Space
III. Interfaces as Maps of Capitalism and Class Privilege
IV. Interfaces as Maps of Discursive Privilege
V. Interfaces as Maps of Rationalism and Lagocentric Privilege
VI. What to Do?
VII. Becoming Technology Critics as Well as Technology Users
VIII. Contributing to Technology Design
IX. Re-Conceiving the Map of the Interface
X. Toward Critical Readings of Interfaces
"Indeed, from the work of computers and composition specialists, it is clear that computers, like other complex technologies, are articulated in many ways with a range of existing cultural forces and with a variety of projects in our education system, projects that run the gamut from liberatory to oppressive" (2).
"If we hope to get English composition teachers to recognize how our use of computers achieves both great good and great evil--often at the same time, as Joseph Weizenbaum points out--we have to educate them to be technology critics as well as technology users" (3).
"In effect, interfaces are cultural maps of computer systems, and as Denis Wood points out, such maps are never ideologically innocent or inert" (4).
"The interface does not, for example, represent the world in terms of a kitchen counter top, a mechanics workbench, or a fast-food restaurant--each of which would constitute the virtual world in different terms according to the valued and orientations of, respectively, women in the home, skilled laborers, or the rapidly increasing numbers of employees in the fast-food industry" (5).
- Related sources:
- de Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
- Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.
- Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
- Ohmann, Richard. "Literacy, Technology, Monopoly Capitalism." College English 47 (1985): 675-689.
- Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
- Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York, NY: Guilford, 1992.
Phelps, "The Domain of Composition"
P helps, Louise Wetherbee. "The Domain of Composition." Rhetoric Review 4 (1986): 182-95.
Phelps frames the field of composition studies by identifying its domain, a term she uses both as "a scene of action" and also "a space one controls." Tracing through each of these senses of "domain," Phelps accounts for the field in 1986 by moving through three sections: I. Core; II. Margins; and, III. Vision. A disciplinary domain, according to Phelps, has these elements: "a group of inquirers, a characteristic attitude toward phenomena, the objects of inquiry themselves, the means of inquiry, its purposes, and scenic factors" (2). Because written discourse is central to our work, compositionists themselves become entangled with their research; teaching, after all, depends upon symbolic action not only as an object of study, but as a kind of activity. Phelps acknowledges the uses of "performance" to describe what happens when reading writing texts; she explains the tension between naturalistic views of language view it as best left to its own developmental trajectories and, on the other hand, school-directed approaches to literacy education that adopt "skill" as a way to account for the "indeterminate and fluctuating" competencies that range between experts and non-experts. She also points out that "some of the linguistic, cognitive, and social knowledge needed to coordinate [reading and writing] activities must be studied consciously before it can become tacit in use" (7). In discussing the margins or borders of composition studies with other disciplines, Phelps calls for "syntopical research" (15). The core of composition studies as she accounts for it here is oriented "to symbolic interaction and from development" (14).
"My object is to push outward from the expanding conceptual core of the domain, defined in terms of symbolic action, to its margins, where composition encounters other disciplines and recognizes its own limits" (2).
"[Shoptalk] offers a vocabulary of distinctions among such concepts as technique, skill, strategy, tactics, craft, art, know-how, and knowledge" (8).
"Recent research has submitted this idea [production w/o consideration of reading or consumption] of writing to a critique and moves toward integrating the writer's composing act into a more comprehensive notion of written discourse as a complex social process by which discoursers co-construct meaning" (3).
"That is to say, written discourse as symbolic action can only be understood ecologically, in terms of its rich interactions among acts, meanings, and reality, rather than by a reduction of its texture to ideal elements and rules" (4).
"event psychology" (17), "natural attitude" (6), "personal development" (9), "keyed" (Goffman) (13), "literacy as a power to act in the world" (10), "a network of primary discourse acts" (13)
- Related sources:
- Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, UCalifornia Press, 1968.
- Vygotsky, Thought and Language. Alex Kozulin, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.