Autonomous Technology of Tenure...

Technorhetoricians often spend a good portion of their time educating and convincing their colleagues about the value of digital scholarship. This continued articulation makes technorhetoricians seem like sales people, forcing us to take apart the meaning of our scholarship in ways that sell it to a committee. Highlighting "computer-related work" in this way contributes to the technological framework involved in the scholarship not to the scholarly framework that contributes to the disciplinary conversation. And as the Web becomes more standardized, a la Jakob Nielsen, perspectives of the Web as a publishing venue will likely become more accepted because standards often suggest that someone or something is in charge. But standardizing design does not standardize digital scholarship, nor should it. And certainly design can only tell us part of the story.

But whether we work in print or online environments, aren't we always rhetoricians? And if we are rhetoricians, don't we have the power of language? Can't we change the language games, articulate the rules, and identify the players with that power? No, we can't. Yes, we can. Supposedly, once we have tenure, we can change things from inside the system where it will be easier because we'll be directly involved in the relationships of power affecting our position. But as James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear (1996) explain so well, "such change is often very difficult to accomplish from within a discourse" because "no Discourse…wants to apprentice its newcomers to a process that makes them question its fundamental values and perspectives on the world" (p. 13). The game of tenure is no exception. It comes with a sense of urgency: "I have to get tenure." "What if I don't get tenure?" "When do you come up for tenure?" "Have I published enough for tenure?" And so on. We talk about tenure as if it is an autonomous system over which we have no control. It is time, however, to speak up and take control.

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