Reading Response 5

Brittany Ross

In Cynthia Selfe’s chapter, “Lest we think the revolution is a revolution” she explores how we as Americans, and specifically “English studies teachers”, focus too much on how technology is changing, and link that with positive social change. This she claims is not the case. She says “…our culture, and the social formations that make up this culture, react with a special kind of conservatism to technology”. Here Selfe is saying that we as Americans have popular social narratives, or believes and attitudes that are resistant to the idea of technology creating positive social change. Selfe goes on to describe three popular social narratives that illustrate her point. The first narrative she explains is called the Global Village. In this narrative, all the people of the world are equal despite of race or social standing, and are connected, communicating with one another and all cooperating for the commonnwealth. The reason that we create this narrative is that we like to have the idea that everyone can be equal and connected. However, in our society we have “a history of experiencing the world as missionaries, as colonists, as tourists, as representatives of multinational companies”, and for this reason, we create a revised version of this narrative Selfe calls the “electronic colony” in which Americans are the owners and creators of the technology that we distributing to foreign countries, teaching them how to use it, and therefore controlling the users of said technology. Americans revise this narrative so that we can have the advantage for ourselves, so that we won’t have to forgo the privileges that we have as a one of the global leader nations, we want to control the global village, not be an equal part in it. We want to be able to continue to control the majority of the world’s power and resources.

Those unfamiliar with this school of thought may be interested to know that it basically boils down to that we, as Americans, like to believe and convince ourselves, to make ourselves feel better, that we can use technology for the greater good and to connect the world and knock down the social borders of color and class. However, we are a society that takes up only 20% of the population, yet consumes 80% of the world’s goods. Why would we want to give up all of the power and control and wealth we have? We wouldn’t, as our own history shows us, time and time again, we will do anything to get what we want. (Cherokee removal, slavery, the Iraq war, anyone?) In my own opinion, we as a society are too selfish to give up all the resources that we have to contribute to the greater global good. A truly equal global community will never exist, there are just too many power and money hungry people in the world today.