Computers and Composition 12, 331-334 (1995)

Wonder of it All: Computers, Writing and the New World

Centers,

DIANA GEORGE

Michigan Technological University

Like many of my friends and colleagues, I am fascinated by the possibilities of the" networked classroom, of computer-aided collaboration, of e-mail and national and international information and conference lists. I like the idea of letting students watch a text form and reform. And, I 've even taught a computer-intensive writing class to make some of that possible.

But, also like many of my friends and colleagues, I love the feel of new pen and fine paper and the look in a listener's eye when I read my own work aloud. I like checking for body language and adjusting my words to the shifts and shrugs of the audience. My students must like that a bit, too, because halfway through my computer-intensive course they complained that they spent so much time looking at monitors--wording, rewording, and rearranging the text at hand--that they never took the time to turn to each other and actually talk about their papers.

That, I know, was my failing, not the fault of the technology or the lab environment, but those students did identify something important in their experience that I believe is touched upon in both of the articles I am responding to. What those students recognized was that technology alone will make no revolution. The lessons--hard lessons--we have learned as instructors of writing and as tutors in writing centers must be remembered and heeded as we turn to face what Dickie Selfe appropriately calls the tsunami.

Let me put it another way: Change is difficult mostly because we just don't know how to change. On the last day of this term, I watched five groups of upper division students in a colleague's rhetoric and composition course present what were supposed to be their visions for recreating first-year composition. They could do with the course whatever they wanted. They could make it an entirely different course with new goals and with new ways of thinking about composition, writing, speaking, thinking, and communicating. Only one of those groups managed to come up with anything remotely different from what is commonly thought of as first-year writing. The others offered changes that were far more rule-governed and form-bound than even some of the most rigid writing classes we've all heard about. I am convinced that it wasn't that they wanted to take these kinds of courses themselves. It was more that, when confronted with the task of reconstructing within an old system, they could think of no real way to do that. We are, it is true, bound by our own traditions, made by our own systems. We have agency, yes. But we are also constructed within systems that make that agency problematic.

We begin, many of us, with stories that must sound familiar to readers and listeners because, as cultural theorist Stephen Greenblatt (1991) reminds us, stories have worth

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Diana George, Department of Humanities, WAHC 319, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931. Her e-mail address is <dgeorge~mtu.edu>.

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only when they are familiar. The unusual, the different, the odd has little value as a way of understanding cultural meaning or mapping cultural terrain (Greenblatt, 1991, p. 3). Stories give us grounding. When, for example, Lester Faigley (1992) in Fragments of Rationality tells us the story of his networked classrooms, he expects his readers to recognize certain patterns, certain reactions, certain troubled waters. Without the recognition, we would learn very little. When I tell the story of watching those students struggle to create something new within the old structures, I hope that you will also say, "Yes. I've seen that happen." Such stories tell us who we are and how we respond to the needs we see around us.

As valuable as storytelling may be, however, I want to take us a bit beyond story here, to explore what it might mean to be bound by the knowable. In the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver--seeking a way out of Hyouhnmland--looks through his spyglass only to discover an island in the distance. He knows that he can probably make it to that island. In a gesture of community, he places the glass up to the eye of his companion, the Sorrel Nag, so that he might see the island, too. The Sorrel Nag sees nothing but a cloud bank and despairs that his friend will drown once pushed out to sea. Gulliver explains very simply to the reader the Sorrel Nag's inability to see that land mass. In Hyouhnmland, no one believes there is any place other than the island they are on. Thus, the Sorrel Nag cannot see land because his system does not allow him to see land. Gulliver, of course, has been to other places. He knows there is land, so he interprets the vague shape out there as a land mass. That plot device suggests to me that Swift is certainly the intellectual contemporary of scholars like Greenblatt who seek to explain the cultural configuration of knowledge and representation. In his most recent work Marvelous Possessions, Greenblatt (1991) explains to us why it is that we should not accept most of what we read by New World explorers. Though Greenblatt resists relying on what might be called "cultural determinism" (all representation is determined by cultural paradigms and cultural ideologies), he does remind us that these explorers were united by similar impulses, reactions, and cultural representations. The most consistent of these was the feeling of wonder and amazement at this new place/these new people.

I have, you might think, taken us far off the course of computers and writing centers, but I believe this is a path worth exploring, so I am going to lead you down it a bit further. "Wonder is," Greenblatt (1991) tells us, "the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and ifitellectual experience in the presence of radical difference" (p. 14). There is much more to his discussion, as you might imagine, but the central argument here is that, faced with a world that seemed so utterly different from their own, Europeans "experienced," Greenblatt claims, "some- thing like the 'startle reflex' one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole momentarily convulsed" (p. 14). It was wonder, pure and simple. And, Greenblatt goes on to argue, their reaction to wonder was the common reaction--fear, awe, pleasure, pain, worry, amazement. They did not respond to or represent the New World in the way they might respond, to or represent the familiar. They had no real intellectual engagement or way of negotiating with this new thing. European explorers' failure to understand the New World and its people, Greenblatt argues, was bound by the radical difference of this place.

Now, I will return to that question of computers and writing centers. As both Dickie Selfe and Nancy Grimm point out in their discussions, the technology is here. We cannot ignore it. Furthermore, we already know that computer technology--the communication revolutionmis much more powerful than skills-and-drills workbooks on a screen. What

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we don't quite yet know, I am convinced, is how this "New World" really will reconfigure our teaching and our tutoring. Because we come to the technology with structures already in place (one-to-one tutoring or networked conversations--both revolutionary strategies in and of themselves) we are in danger of either recreating the old or staring at the new in wonder--hoping for the utopian classroom that too many of our colleagues envision.

Both writing centers and computer centers claim they are at the margins of the university. In too many universities, writing instruction in any form is at the margins. And, yet, the tsunami is out there. Every college and university with the means (and many without) is scrambling to enter the information age, to make students computer literate, to join domestic classrooms with international companies, to connect students from the midwest with students from the south, east, west, north. The connections are possible, yes. They have even become common practice in many places, although here I am again reminded of Stephen Greenblatt (1991) and his discussion, somewhat later in Marvelous Possessions, of Columbus. On December 18, 1492, Columbus describes an encounter with the islanders of Tortuga. He begins, naturally, by explaining that he had no understanding at all of those islanders' language. "Nevertheless," Columbus writes,

I gathered that he told me that if something from this place pleased me that the whole island was at my command . . . . What great lords Your Highnesses must be, he said.., that they had sent me here without fear; and many other things passed between them that I did not understand, except that I saw well that they took everything as a great wonder. (p. 13)

What has occurred in this representation of contact is a recording of Columbus' imagined conversation. He had no more idea of what the Tortugian had said to him than anyone who could not understand that language had. Columbus had only a concept of himself offering trinkets and the Tortugian "king" as he calls him, offering his entire island in innocent exchange. If you will recall Dickie's paper for a moment, that is something like what David Coogan (1993) is complaining about in his discussion of online tutoring. " I ' m still not sure yet if I can tutor a stranger--a text, really," he writes. Yes. David Coogan understands already that the text is not the person, that the moves on the computer conference (although they might somehow be equivalent to body language) are not the same moves as those we see in the chair next to us. And, even that kind of interpretation, as Nancy and her colleagues at the MTU Writing Center have demon- strated through some of their participant-observation work, is problematic.

The deal is, we don't always know what we see or hear even when it is familiar to us. We are interpreters, and when the medium through which we interpret is as fascinating and as wonderful, as computer technology, we are easily fooled into believing we are seeing something that is not there--thus, the safety and anonymity of online romances across states and oceans and continents. The lover can be whoever or whatever we want. That doesn't mean he or she is real or even a lover. As one recent New Yorker cartoon dog proclaims, "On lnternet, nobody knows you're a dog."

The promise of the Internet is a promise of a new, whole communi ty- -a community of scholars and learners and business people and politicians and citizens. Stuart Hall, speaking of Raymond Williams, reminds us, however, that there is a real danger in constructing, a "spuriously unified cultural identity and a falsely continuous national history when the real history is one of ruptures and discontinuities" (p. 359). We can too easily believe in a new kind of cultural community based on nothing but online computer conversations. As Hall (1993) writes:

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Isn't it the case that, in the modern world, the more we examine "whole ways of life" the more internally diversified, the more cut through by complex patterns of similarity and difference, they appear to be? Modern people of all sorts and conditions, it seems, have had, increasingly, as a condition of survival, to be members, simultaneously, of several, overlapping "imagined communities" and the negotiations between and across these complex "borderlines" are characteristic of modernity itself. (p. 359)

Here, I am reminded of what Kurt Spettmeyer (1993) tells us in his introduction to Common Grotmd. In his own story of learning to teach writing, he found himself asking, "why had I, and my teachers before me, so readily supposed that we could 'just teach, ' and that our students could 'just write, ' without any serious reflection on the nature of teaching and writ ing?" (p. 2). Without dwelling too long on the obvious- - tha t composition theory and research in pedagogy have, for years, sprung from that question or questions like i t - - I propose that Spellmeyer is reminding us again of the value of paying attention not simply to what we do but to why we do it and for what end. What we need, Spellmeyer argues, is a theory of the nature of writing that somehow enables our teaching. That, in the end, is what Dickie Selfe and Nancy Gr imm are arguing for, as well.

We cannot simply add computers to a writing center any more than we can simply add tutoring to a computer lab. Without a theory of the nature of electronic communication that elucidates our practice of teaching writing, we are on the road to wonder. It 's an expensive trip, too. Without the theory building that people like Dickie Selfe, Cynthia Selfe, and Nancy Gr imm do, we have no way of understanding the New Wor ld- - the world of marvels, of wonder. We only have computers and tutors and siudents. Not much in the way of reading the map.

Diana George is an Associate Professor of Cultural Theory and Composition studies in the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University. Her work has appeared in such journals as PostScript, The Jottrnal of Fihn and Video, The Jottrnal of Advanced Composition, College Composition and Commttnication, and Cultural Studies. She is also co-author, with John Trimbur, of Reading Cttltttre: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing, currently in its second edition. Her e-mail is <dgeorge @ m t u . e d u > .

R E F E R E N C E S

Coogan, D. (1993, September 29). Re: Uploading papers [Online Listserv]. Available e-mail: <wiole- l@mizzoul.bitnet>.

Faigley, L. (1992). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Greenblatt, S. (1991). Marvelous possessions: The wonder of the new world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, S. (1993). Culture, community, nation. Cultural Studies. 7. 349-363. Spell meyer, K. (1993). Common ground: Dialogue, understanding, and the teaching of composition. New York:

Prentice-Hall.