Cyborgs and Foucault vs. the Digital Divide

Interface is a lens, and that lens is crafted by a developer. This may sound like a quasi-creationist reading—especially if I were to say that our very eyes are interfaces through which we process data—but we aren’t born cyborgs. We have to become them.

In several respects, computer users have become cyborgs. When using computers, we adopt another set of eyes (via monitors), hands (keyboard and mouse), and even voice(s) (representative of both our words on a web page or voice through a mic). We can remove ourselves from our cybernetic state, yet it’s still a remediated (if limited) form of perception.

Interfaces and the tools through which we navigate them carry their own sets of cultural assumptions and privileges for people who are used to navigating those kinds of cognitive structures. Selfe and Selfe point out that computer interfaces have been constructed for a privileged class of American English speakers (74). In this course, we’ve made much ado about how modes and media affect composition. So, what does computer literacy mean for oppression?

I think that expecting certain computer literacy can be just as oppressive as demanding an absolutely particular grammar structure. Do any of you remember having the word “aint” bashed from your skulls in elementary school, despite it being a perfectly functional version of “isn’t”? Did anyone really tell you why? Even Word is enraged at me for using it—red lines abound! Maybe this is a silly example, but we can come up with grim historical analogues. America, like other conquering nations, understands the tactical value of culture-kill and language death. How do you think the “West” was won?

I’m not saying (and neither are Selfe nor Banks for that matter) that we should abolish all standards of interface, mode, grammar—what have you—in favor of a free-for all blab-spree of jubilant, self-indulgent, supposedly free-speechy democratized flying robot freedom. However, we can and should teach, as Selfe and Selfe and Banks promote, how to be critical of the existing systems. And no, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in computer programming to do it.

Selfe and Selfe contend, “computer interfaces…enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism” (69): the digital age, a term that sounds almost utopian, hasn’t benefitted everyone, and certainly doesn’t represent everyone. Adam Banks points out that the Digital Divide, a term that has fallen under much critical scrutiny post-Clinton administration, hasn’t been breached. He poses, “access to technologies and the discursive practices that determine power relations in our society, the Digital Divide, and the larger history of African American is, essentially a rhetorical problem…the rhetorical problems that dominate understandings of race in our discipline are technological problems” (12). This relationship between rhetoric and technology doesn’t merely concern access, but also the forms and uses this access takes. For victims of the Digital Divide, current interface models are insufficient.

Richard Ohmann is right to point out that not everyone necessarily benefits from computer technology, and such technology, doesn’t necessarily promote the kinds of literacy that writing teachers strive to convey. Adam Banks uses a particularly striking example that illustrates these fears. In Camden school district (New Jersey), administrators paid over ten million in site licenses for educational software that teaches little more than remedial grammar exercises, which are too narrowly focused to promote compositional skills or critical thinking except for how to navigate the interface itself (19). Effectively, these exercises could democratize student opportunities about as well as the burger button on registers at McDonald’s.

Simply having material access to computers doesn’t alleviate the Digital Divide. According to Banks, users “must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively” (41). Like Selfe and Selfe, he promotes understanding both the benefits and problems/dangers of using any technology (42).
But how do we identify the loci of those dangers? Maybe I have a partial answer, or at least a partial thought.

I don’t really want to abuse Foucault, *but* we should consider the implications that the Digital Divide has on a panoptic society. I’ll go out on a limb (and not much of one), and point out that computers—as are any other FCC regulated modes—can (and do) function as an ideal panoptic cell in many respects. IP addresses can be tracked, purchases online are constantly recorded, computers can be hacked into and their contents stolen, illegal downloading and other thievery is punished and internet users can in general assume the presence of some kind of observer (be it an administrator, moderator, or government tracking system). Worse for the Digital Divide, there’s no obvious central tower to take, no clear map of what cell leads where.

Learning to navigate a panoptically observable interface—in many respects a material factor in the Digital Divide— can be treacherous to identity construction online. While I don’t believe that the internet is a place where ideas of represented gender, race, and class don’t necessarily come to bear, the interfaces through which users access the internet certainly try to make us believe that this is the case. Selfe and Selfe explain some of the particulars (68), but their most salient points concern representing agency through interface. For example, demanding American Standard English and ASCII character sets in word processing programs can seriously damage agency. Sure, character packs are available, but not everyone will know how to go about accessing them, much less installing them. Furthermore, as Banks contests, students need to have regular access to computers in order to exert any sort of agency (41). I’m writing this blog post from my home “office,” ensconced amidst my writerly accoutrements—it’s a comfortable (well…not really) place where I can sit and think and type on my own terms in my own time. I have agency in constructing this space.

I feel as if I’m drifting, so I’ll do my best to tie this all together. Interface mapping involves a kind of cybernetic relationship with computers. That relationship is dictated by the designers of technology in some pretty specific ways, at least until we as users learn to navigate it and define the terms of that relationship. The Digital Divide can’t be solved purely by providing access—that solution simply introduces students to an interface that can’t readily be interfaced with. The Digital Divide will be better bridged when users can become agents who understand their potential roles in the panoptic construction, and use these gazes to their relative advantage. The tower in the middle loses just that much more power the more those lateral cell walls are broken down. But victims of the Digital Divide have to break down those walls in their own ways—like everyone ultimately—then those lateral connections will become clearer, and their uses available. A critical understanding of this mode will help agents become agents—to become themselves in essence—when putting computer technology to specific use.