Selber, rhetoric, and the way we use computers

Okay, I'm running a little behind on my blogging. It's not that I have procrastinated, but somehow life gets in the way and I had more on my plate than I could handle. It's a long story and one I won't bore you with, but it's a perfect transition to rhetorical theories in technology.

The ideas that Selber has about "human interface" (chapter 4 "Rhetorical Literacy) with computers seems to me to coincide with what we do every day of our lives. Although Selber uses the term "Human-Computer Interaction," when you think about it, it's what we do with our friends, colleagues, and people we deal with everyday. We speak to people and every word that we use is persuasive in some way or another. What is the alternative? We are deemed fakes or liars if we fail. Should it be any different for electronic media? Absolutely not. I know it sounds radical, but technology and people now seem to meld together so seamlessly that they are difficult to compartmentalize in our minds.

To give you a good example, I was interupted while I was creating this blog--somewhere after the line in the first paragraph that says "It's a long story..."--by some friends who I hadn't seen in a while. I couldn't be rude and say, "Oh by the way, you are interupting me in my endeavors to catch up on my school work. I don't have time to socialize right now." Instead, I put my best face forward and was a hospitable guest. But there is always an icon in my brain that says, "finish and save, finish and save." The icon can't be turned off. My friends who came over started looking like Web sites that take too long to download. All I wanted to do was Refresh or Delete. So here I am hours later trying to piece together thoughts that probably don't make any sense at all, but somehow they did before I was interupted.

The point I'm trying to make is that we somehow forget which world we are living in. We can no longer ignore that we have a foot in a digital world and a foot in the real world, and keeping a clear delineation between these two worlds can be difficult. If you think I'm overstating my case, let me give you a quote from Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who, like Selber, teaches the psychology behind technology. (By the way, I would have liked to have posted this as a PDF but it's much too difficult with Blogger).

"We live in a culture of simulation. Our games, our economic and political systems, and the ways architects design buildings, chemists evisage molecules, and surgeons perform operations all use simulation technology. In 10 years the degree to which simulations are ebedded in every area of life will have increased exponentially. We need to develop a new form of media literacy: readership for the culture of simulation.

We come to written text with habits of readership based on centuries of civilization. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Who wrote these, what is their message, why were they written, and how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central project for higher education during the next 10 years should be creating programs in information technology literacy, with the goal of teaching students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit, challenging their built-in assumptions" (885-86).

Turkle's argument is that we live in such a simulated world that computers only recognize success or failure. Success or failure is determined by the programmer who made the program and gray areas where discourse might occur are omitted. Selber's argument runs along the same lines, except that he sees technology to promote discourse instead of disouraging it. My opinion is that it depends on the program you are using. Teaching students the difference is the key.

I guess the point I'm trying to make with this blog is this: Turkle is exactly right when she suggests we question the software we are using and what its function is. There is more to it than we explicitly see. What is implicitly being sold? If we can't answer these questions for ourselves and our students then we need to hit Refresh or Delete. We are still humans and there is no getting around that. If I could Delete my friends when they show up at unexpected times, Delete my problems when they cropped up, and Refresh my memory after all the hooplah, life would just be grand, but it just doesn't work that way does it?

Turkle, Sherry. "How Computers Change the Way We Think." The McGraw Hill Reader. Ed.
Gilbert H. Muller. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008. 881-886.