Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution

Cynthia Selfe’s chapter, “Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution” was very well done. She covers these concepts of “Images of Technology and the Nature of Change”. Change, Technology, and the Status Quo: Some Background. The “Global Village” and the “Electronic Colony” “Land of Equal Opportunity” and “Land of Difference” “The Un-Gendered Utopia” and “The Same Old Gendered Stuff”

This chapter covers so much ground; I’m having a tough time finding only one central claim. For this assignment, I will say her testimonial “Like most Americans, however, even though educators have made these adaptations, we remain decidedly undecided about technology and change. At one level, we believe in the pairing; we believe in the computer’s power, and we believe strongly in the beneficial ways that technology promises to improve our lives (Bump, 1990; Delany and Landow, 1991: Snyder, 1996) at other levels, we fear the effects of technology and the potent changes that it introduces into familiar systems. (Apple, 1986; Kramarea, 1988; Hawisher and Selfe, 1993; Selfe and Selfe, 1994.)” is her all encompassing claim.

Further into the chapter, she shows us two IBM ads, the first giving the impression that IBMs technology will make the repairing of the Frauenkirche, a church destroyed during the allied firebombing if Dresden in 1945 an easier project, “linking ‘21^st century tool’ with the imagination of ‘18^th century craftsmanship’”. Cynthia feels that this image ”reduces the worlds’ problems to a set of embarrassingly quick fixes.” Basically, Cynthia sees “all too familiar stories of how to multiply our own markets, how to increase our own cultural profits at the expense of others, how to take effective advantage of need and difference whenever we identify them, and how to reduce the cultures of other people into inexcusable simplifications”. I completely agree with what Cynthia is saying.

Cynthia scrutinizes, “As much as Americans might like to think it; technology is not that solution for all of the World’s problems-and, indeed, it might well be a contributing cause to many of them.” I think there are many who actually agree with Cynthia. “Nothing can provide redress for the millions of human lives, the art, the history, the beauty lost in Dresden.”

I agree that Americans like to think they can improve other cultures with technology, a point that needs emphasizing, because once these changes are made, it’s almost impossible to go back to the way you lived before. We are all victims to how technology has changed our lives. When cell phones originally came out, they were huge and inconvenient, I think, because they stayed in your car and were used for emergency purposes only. Now they are a social lifeline and students can justify why it’s okay to text and talk with friends during class. In Digital Nation, one of the people they interviewed said that 25 years ago, she and her husband went on a vacation and didn’t talk to anyone at home for 2 weeks. Amazing! We just went to Mexico for a week and talked to our children every day. Are we missing the point about what a vacation is supposed to be? Next time, I’m turning the cell phone off and I bet everything will be just fine here at home!