Imagine, if you will, sitting at a computer terminal with a notebook next to the keyboard. The notebook contains a list of queries required to achieve a specific response from a particular location. The background color of the screen is black with green text. You have no choice in font style, color, or size. Your queries need to be timed properly for the recipient and written concisely.
This was my first experience with the intranet while I was in the US Air Force, stationed at Shaw AFB in Sumter, SC. I was sending a query to Red Flag at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, NV regarding repairs to a radar transmitter’s power supply. It was the summer of 1994. While my query looked similar to the above image, it was much more involved. However, these electronic queries removed the need for playing the “tag” game with phone calls across DSN (Defense Switched Network) lines and losing vital information – and time – in the process.
I never did (and still don’t) consider myself technologically inclined; in fact, I was the typical late 80s/early 90s high school “nerd”. Braces on my teeth (rare in those days), coke bottle glasses, and my freckled nose buried in a book (whether it was studying or leisure reading) was how you’d find me most days. So when my father purchased – and eventually let me use – our first personal home computer (that’s exactly what they called it back then), I was impressed at the thought of it, but didn’t really care to learn about it. I wanted the computer to simply do what I wanted it to, not understand how it did those things.
“The appearance of any new information technology… provides conditions for major societal change… can take a very long time to occur.” (Landow, 29) I can honestly say that I have seen and experienced this first hand, so it doesn’t truly seem all that long to me. From that Amiga Commodore 2000 home computer to the five-pound laptop I’m using right now, information technology – digital information technology – has evolved greatly. Who could’ve predicted that within less than 50 years of the first personal home computer being sold to individual households, those same households would be able to conduct extensive online research, record and post videos, and communicate with family members across the globe (my mother’s family all live in Germany, by the way) – all without leaving the warmth of the their homes? Nevermind the fact that many of these same things can now be done with our smartphones!
After leaving the Air Force and obtaining my Bachelor’s in Education, then my Master’s in Literacy, I taught fourth grade for three years in a local public school system. Since then, I’ve moved on to teaching college students. While teaching, I’ve discovered that my students love their electronic devices – smartphones and laptops, specifically – for information retrieval purposes. “The convenience of such information retrieval has increasingly led students and faculty to use such search tools instead of physical libraries.” (Landow, 38) In this regard, I believe that society has lost the “art” of conducting physical research. Wikipedia and Google do not have all the answers, nor are they the best tools for finding them.
As I previously mentioned, I am not technologically inclined, so I was “lost” for quite a bit of Landow’s material regarding hypertext. All of a sudden, I had an epiphany while reading Eyman’s text. His Brooke quote regarding arrangement in describing “links…(as) rhetorical practices of arrangement, attempts to communicate affinities, connections, and relationships” (8). My annotations are quite comical. Scrawled across the margins, I had written “Hypertext = hyperLINK”. I went back to Landow’s work and was able to better understand what I was reading.
I will say that I disagree when I read “resistance to recognizing the role of information technology in culture… particularly information technology, can never have cultural effects.” (Landow, 49) Information technology in our culture, not to mention cultures across the globe, has metamorphosed in such a way that its origins – that is to say, the origins of the original form of the information (before it became digital) – are almost unrecognizable. Society and culture changes; information technology changes with it, whether we like it or not.
February 23, 2020 at 12:43 am
You saw the Werner Herzog movie, right? If not, make time for it–you’ll really appreciate the first 30 minutes or so. As you were working with computer communication in the 90s military, I’ll bet that you were surrounded by quite a bit of talk about the new internet (although it’s very possible you weren’t aware of it–I was beginning to use computers then in graduate school, but I would say about 80 percent of everything went right over my head as I didn’t find it particularly interesting till a bit later). It sounds like your experience was very controlled, clean, and professional/formal at this time. That was about the time that the various social groups and forces were beginning to vie for control of the networks. On the one hand, there was the military (where it began more or less) and on the other hand, the freedom-loving public, although at the beginning that public was small.
I’m not entirely sure what Landow means by that statement, to be honest. I’d love to hear more about what it means to you. Resistance to technology has always had cultural effects, I believe, although perhaps what Landow means is that resistance to acknowledging the role of technology in shaping culture generally doesn’t help society progress….The statement that you made directly after that actually supports that last point. However, I would argue that a lot of forms of information do persist over time, although they also become achieved through newer media. Screens persist through the 20th-21st century and they share a lot of qualities with paper, or in earlier eras, wax or papyrus tablets. Books have been around an awfully long time and, despite digital texts, seem like they will persist. (Keypunch cards, however, seem pretty dead and don’t seem to be making a resurgence any time soon.)
March 4, 2020 at 9:18 am
Hi Joanna,
I too cannot fathom how far technology has come in such a short amount of time. With such rapid innovation, I’ve often wondered where technology will go next. Everyone is after the next best thing that its a tad unnerving to consider what’s coming that we cannot even fathom yet, especially considering no one could have guessed the technology that we have now!
These readings were a bit dense for me as well and I found myself rereading very often in order to grasp some understanding. The quote you pulled was definitely a metaphorical light bulb moment for me. I think its interesting to look at reader interaction with an online text. Even with just one link, there are countless different methods and orders that one could go about that would create different experiences with the same text. I think that that, in a way, is one of the main points of evolution within rhetoric. While written rhetoric is static in a sense, digital rhetoric is “live.”
April 20, 2020 at 10:18 pm
Hi Joanna! I really related to your experience about research in the classroom. I’m teaching AP Capstone Research–a senior class requiring extensive research. Most students start the year assuming that they’ll ask Alexa or Siri their questions and then report on the findings. I’m dumbfounded. There is a lot of hand-holding that goes on during the first few months to get them comfortable enough with the old school form of researching. Instead of resisting technology and saying no Wikipedia or Google (the two high school go tos), I’ve created activities to help them see that those two sites offer surface level content and that the deeper answers to their research questions will be found in other forms of technology (JSTOR or other online databases). I’m still struggling with the push and pull of acceptable technology though. 🙁
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