It has been over a decade since the publication of Stuart Blythe's (1997) oft-cited critical treatise on the function of communication technologies in the writing center, "Networked Computers + Writing Centers = ?"
Steering a path between what he called instrumental and substantive theories of technology, Blythe (1997) discouraged us from seeing software and/or hardware as mere tools, and from imagining their inevitable structuring influence as a warrant for sorting good technologies from bad. In other words, that a given technology will necessarily shape or reshape human values and social interaction need not lock us into an end game of accepting or rejecting technologies on the grounds that they will enable or obstruct the reality we hope comes to pass. For example, already in 1997, Blythe found writing center studies engaged in a narrow discussion, some praising synchronous (real-time) technologies and warning against the asynchronous, and vice versa.
| What troubled Blythe seems not to have been so much the fundamentally ideological process of highlighting and hiding, but the way this discourse situated writing teacher-theorists in relation to the production of writing technologies. A decade after Blythe’s essay was published, the field of computers and writing might now be said to be grounded (in part) on the notion that those of us who teach and theorize writing must become active participants in the composition of the technologies that define what writing is, how it takes place, and what it is for. |
