The article on biotechnology was the least interesting of the three this week. This sounds strange to me, even as I write this sentence, because I am a science fiction nut. However, the topic was supposed to focus on composition and its connection to emerging biotechnology, which I found to be a tenuous connection at best.
Sidler begins with an idea very similar to the focus of McGee and Ericsson’s article on Microsoft Word grammar checkers: technology is the major motivating factor in determining how educational resources are used and how industry as a whole focuses its energy and money. But where McGee and Ericsson focused directly on the effects of technology on composition, Sidler is all over the place. For the first seven of thirteen pages, she focuses on the history of the genome project, its ethical dilemmas, and its impact on the manner in which employers hire and universities design programs. The only topic that is even close to affecting composition is Sidler’s allusion to the idea that the scientists working on the genome project are influenced by “Anglo-American epistemology” (132). Even this minor connection to composition only relates the idea that a few rhetorical concepts like metaphor may be employed to help non-scientists understand what the actual scientists are creating. The metaphor that Sidler uses throughout the article compares the genome project to the Book of Life.
She goes back to more practical connections between technology and composition by “recognizing the inherently rhetorical function of multimedia software” and the possibility that “video will be the next networked media for classroom technologies” (137). I have no argument with Sidler on these points. There is no doubt that multimedia influences the choices students make in their writing and probably in their cognitive logic. I also agree that visual rhetoric will be the next big technological watershed in the teaching and presentation of composition. My problem with these points is they have very little to do with biotechnology, which is supposedly the primary focus.
At best this article serves as a warning that “something” is coming that will change the way composition is studied, learned, and taught. Sidler alludes to multimedia possibly being implanted into the viewer, thereby erasing our current ideas of media. This new technology might eliminate the middle man in the transaction of information from a sender and receiver; the transaction would be like osmosis. I use the words “possibly” and “might” because that is all Sidler gives me to work with. Biotechnology might very well be used to grow encyclopedia entries out of one’s hand when desired, or it could be used to alter one of a human’s eyes into a digital camera that captures every image one sees and transfers them to a component implanted into the brain for editing, then the edited data could be projected back onto the page for publication; the possibility is just as likely.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Tony, I have to disagree with you. I found this article to be the most interesting of the week’s readings. Perhaps because I am not a sci-fi buff, I hadn’t given much thought to the ideas Sidler presents, and I have to say I found them very exciting. Sidler makes pretty clear that in an age of biotechnology, composition still matters.
ReplyDeleteShe lists several areas in which writing will still be important even in an age of extreme technological advances: writing about “ethical and cultural debates” surrounding these developments (130); “teaching, writing, and research” about “the culture of electronic information technologies” (132); weighing in on “the development of future policies” and “questions of intellectual property and genetic information” (134); “mak[ing] apparent the parallels between bioinformatics, computer languages, and writing” and being “voices of critical consciousness” (136); “provid[ing] critical insight into the pedagogical needs of a student body whose culture-and body-have been formed by genetic advances” (138).
Sidler explains that, because of these many forums for clear, cogent writing, composition studies will continue to be relevant and important and will necessarily evolve and change to meet new demands.