Academic and practitioner journals in fields from electronics to
business to language studies, as well as the popular press, have
for over a decade been proclaiming the arrival of the "computer
revolution" and making far-reaching claims about the impact of
computers on modern western culture. Implicit in many arguments
about the revolutionary power of computers is the assumption that
communication, language, and words are intimately tied to culture
-- that the computer's transformation of communication means a
transformation, a revolutionizing, of culture.
Moving from a vague sense that writing is profoundly different
with different material and technological tools to an understanding
of how such tools can and will change writing, writers, written
forms, and writing's functions is not a simple matter. Further, the
question of whether -- and how -- changes in individual writers'
experiences with new technologies translate into large-scale,
cultural "revolutions" remains unresolved.
This book is about the relationship of writing to its
technologies. It uses history, theory and empirical research to
argue that the effects of computer technologies on literacy are
complex, always incomplete, and far from unitary -- despite a great
deal of popular and even scholarly discourse about the
inevitability of the computer revolution. The author argues that
just as computers impact on discourse, discourse itself impacts
technology and explains how technology is used in educational
settings and beyond.
The opening chapters argue that the relationship between writing
and the material world is both inextricable and profound. Through
writing, the physical, time-and-space world of tools and artifacts
is joined to the symbolic world of language. The materiality of
writing is both the central fact of literacy and its central puzzle
-- a puzzle the author calls "The Technology Question" -- that
asks: What does it mean for language to become material? and What
is the effect of writing and other material literacy technologies
on human thinking and human culture? The author also argues for an
interdisciplinary approach to the technology question and lays out
some of the tenets and goals of technology studies and its approach
to literacy.
The central chapters examine the relationship between writing and
technology systematically, and take up the challenge of accounting
for how writing -- defined as both a cognitive process and a
cultural practice -- is tied to the material technologies that
support and constrain it. Haas uses a wealth of methodologies
including interviews, examination of writers' physical interactions
with texts, think-aloud protocols, rhetorical analysis of discourse
about technology, quasi-experimental studies of reading and
writing, participant-observer studies of technology development,
feature analysis of computer systems, and discourse analysis of
written artifacts. Taken as a whole, the results of these studies
paint a rich picture of material technologies shaping the activity
of writing and discourse, in turn, shaping the development and use
of technology.
The book concludes with a detailed look at the history of literacy
technologies and a theoretical exploration of the relationship
between material tools and mental activity. The author argues that
seeing writing as an "embodied practice" -- a practice based in
culture, in mind, "and" in body -- can help to answer the
"technology question." Indeed, the notion of embodiment can provide
a necessary corrective to accounts of writing that emphasize the
cultural at the expense of the cognitive, or that focus on writing
as only an act of mind. Questions of technology, always and
inescapably return to the material, embodied reality of literate
practice. Further, because technologies are at once tools for
individual use and culturally-constructed systems, the study of
technology can provide a fertile site in which to examine the
larger issue of the relationship of culture and cognition.
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