III. Background

B. Digital Tools and Composition

Composition instructors have a long tradition of incorporating multiple media technologies into pedagogical practices. Investigating the modern discipline’s early days (1960s-1980s), Palmeri notes that “writing teachers have a substantial history of engaging analog technologies for composing moving images and sounds—a history that predates the rise of the personal computer or the development of the graphical web” (p. 6). Although scholarly engagement with composing technologies is not new, contemporary digital technologies have opened up new possibilities for peer-reviewed scholarly knowledge that were simply not available in the discipline’s early days. Digital technologies (and new digital tools specifically) open up new opportunities to consider “at every point: ‘Shall I express this with sound or music? Shall I say this visually or verbally?’” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2). Therefore, it is important to carefully consider, as did the early compositionists, how we might make best rhetorical use of all available means of communication.

With these new rhetorical means, however, comes the responsibility to consider these tools’ power to significantly influence communicative acts. To take up a technological artifact as tool is to enter into negotiation with an already-established system of knowledge creation and transmission. In his opening to “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger warns that “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral” (p. 1). Arthur’s expansive definition of “technology” as “a means to fulfill a human purpose” (28) likewise highlights the fact that technologies are not neutral entities, but rather socially and culturally constructed tools designed with a specific goal in mind (and not necessarily goals that equally address the total needs of a society’s members). The technologies we use shape our approach to a rhetorical situation, and to the kinds of action and strategies we see as possible based on our tools’ affordances and constraints.

Selfe and Selfe give an example of the socio-cultural assumptions designed into an otherwise apparently neutral technological device, a Mac desktop interface. They call attention to the fact that the interface’s organizing principles privilege office supplies such desks, folders, documents, files, and floppy disks. Any other reasonably familiar metaphorical space for organization might have been implemented: a kitchen, a library, a garden, a gameboard, a movie theater, or a scrapbook, for instance, each of which have their own cultural resonances, implied uses, and implied users. A decision was made in the early design stages, however, to design an interface based on a primarily middle-class corporate working environment. This design choice implies significant assumptions about who is using the device, and for what purposes. If we are to account for the kinds of effects digital tools have on inventing webtext inscapes, these tools’ implicit cultural and epistemological values need to be addressed.

One of the major challenges with critically examining technologies, however, is how easily they seem to become transparent (Haas p. xii), especially when functioning “properly.” Arthur notes that “[m]ost of us do not stop to ponder technology. It is something we find useful but that fades to the background of our world. Yet [...] this thing that fades to the background of our world also creates that world. It creates the realm our lives inhabit” (10). I apply Arthur’s observation on a smaller scale to frame the tools used to create and transmit scholarly knowledge. In the rush to publish, we generally do not stop to consider technologies used to distribute that knowledge for publication, despite the important role these technologies play in creating our disciplinary worlds.

In an investigation of digital scholarly invention and knowledge-making practices, “stopping to ponder technology” is not an idle exercise. Rather, it is an act of critical attention that attempts to “[catch] sight of what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely staring at the technological” (Heidegger 17). It is a recognition that “the images seen by looking through technology may be distorted without looking at the technology itself in a systematic way” (Haas xi). It is an attempt, in other words, to look closely not just at a scholarly webtext’s implicit argument, but also at how a developing inscape refracts through intersections with composing tools.

A particular danger of technological artifacts is their tendency to appear as “black boxed”, or “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success” (Latour 304). This effect channels attention to crystalized results rather than the complex systems out of which they emerged. “Black boxing” gives the appearance that a composed artifact was the logical conclusion of a creation process to which there were no viable alternatives. Haas describes this phenomenon in the context of writing technologies:

When we look at a phenomenon ‘with the eyes of the present’ (Carr, 1961: p. 28), we tend to see a continuous and consistent story--a story that could have turned out no other way. And of course a story that could have turned out no other way tends to obscure the role of human purpose and choice. The same is true of tools and artifacts [...] In other words, when we live through events--rather than looking back at them--the story suddenly seems much less inevitable” (p. 217)

Haas’s proposed antidote to illusions of predetermination is narrative in nature: to challenge neatly linear progressions by grounding an artifact’s story in the messiness of lived experience. I argue that this narrative transparency is one of the key contributions of a digital autoethnographic approach. This methodology allows me to systematically documents experiences of “living through events” so that they are not forgotten or erased in retrospective myth-making. This approach captures crossroads where design might have turned out differently and makes it possible to examine the influences leading to a particular configuration of pieces. Through multiple drafts and contextualizing notes, this approach captures something of the experience of “becoming,” or of living through uncertainty before everything is “locked” into place conceptually—an experience of vulnerability that is lost once the final artifact has taken shape in published form. Such an approach, I suggest, is particularly useful for tracing tools’ influences on a webtext’s developing inscape.

Feenberg discusses the illusion of the “black box” in terms of “closure”:

Closure produces a ‘black box,’ an artifact that is no longer called into question but is taken for granted. Before closure is achieved, it is obvious that social interests are at stake in the design process. But once the black box is closed, its social origins are quickly forgotten. Looking back from the later standpoint, the artifact appears purely technical, even inevitable. This is the source of the deterministic illusion. (11)

Here “closure” is understood in a negative light, as an end to creative development that obscures key knowledge. However, I suggest that digital autoethnography can offer a very different understanding of “closure.” McCloud discusses “closure” in terms of comics and visual narrative, in which the creator provides a series of panels that the reader then mentally integrates into a continuous sequence: “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (67). Closure is thus reframed in this sense as a creative, imaginative participation between author and reader. Rather than viewing a webtext through the lens of Feenberg’s “closure,” as a completed artifact that gives no hint of the intersecting forces out of which it arose, I argue digital autoethnography offers a participatory way of looking at webtexts more in line with McCloud’s understanding of “closure.” These multiple drafts invite the reader into a sequential narrative of change over time by displaying transitional configurations out of which a webtext’s final inscape emerges.