Deepening the Discussion
Why does access dominate our discussions of race and class online? What (if anything) should we being doing to respond to the dearth of discussion beyond access? Please refer to at least two of the readings in your response.
I think that access dominates the discussion because it is the natural starting point. How else can we begin to discuss the problem? I think that computers and composition is held to too strict a measure. As Grabill says, the field is only 10 years old. As such, we are still just scratching the surface of the experience of writing and reading with computers. Traditional classrooms have remained relatively unchanged for a hundred years.
Not only is this a young field of study, but also the technology of computers and composition is changing so rapidly that a scholar’s assumptions may be shifting in the middle of writing a paper or developing a theory.
In Grabill’s article, he spends a lot of time talking about the interface used for writing. But that interface is light years away from the interface of today. Today’s social websites have almost no interface at all. Just a box and some buttons. The rapid change involved in computers and composition makes it tough to study anything but generalities and statistics, which is something that you can do with access. It’s tough to build a castle on shifting sands.
Maybe Blackmon’s article does the best of transforming access into a deeper discussion because it reaches back before computers and composition and discusses the historical distrust of minorities in technological systems of communication. The concept of historical access is a good way to expand the discussion because it ties cultural information (which has a deep history) into the current discussion of access.
Perhaps by linking the discussion of access to include more cultural, economic and social ideas about composition education, we can deepen the discussion.
-M. Markham
