Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

Kyle,
Your mentions of the hammer and muscle memory have made me think about tools we use and habits we form in constructing writing. I’m thinking primarily about genres or forms as tools that become so mundane to the point that they no longer look like tools for expression; instead, they look like containers. Of course, I’m calling upon my usual example: the five-paragraph essay.

My criticism, which I think is typical, stems from its reign as the default form used in many secondary classrooms. When a tool is presented as the only tool, it becomes less a tool and more a mandate—thus restricting how and what we think we can build.

Institutional factors certainly play a role in its reign, but now I wonder if its mundanity came first. And how can teachers disrupt that mundanity? Each time the hammer works, the tool remains simply invisible, masked by ease and success—or, at least what we think is success.

Of course, we could state up front: “Hey, this form is a form, and it’s just one option.” An argument in support of multimodal or multigenre compositions, however, advocates for the experiential approach through less directive assignments. Encouraged to explore communicative options beyond the prose-print default, students are left to make more decisions than ever before about purpose and audience.

I’m wondering this: If provided, how will these experiences in the less-than mundane influence thinking about the process or product at the return to the mundane? Will I approach the writing of traditional essays differently after podcasting? Or will my awareness remain heightened only in non-mundane experiences?
--Kristen

Kylesaurus,

I think that, in many ways, the comparison you draw between Johnson's "mundane" and Heiddeger's "ready-to-handness" succeeds in affirmatively and productively engaging with the technology-nature binary. I appreciate the way that your argument emphasizes embodiment as, to an extent, both cognitive and physical.

What seems to complicate your argument, slightly, in using Heidegger to reconcile man and tool is Heidegger's writings/opinions on technology as degrading and dangerous. I am no Heidegger expert (and as a disclaimer I am using my notes and memorial recall from an undergraduate philosophy course), but it's my understanding that for Heidegger, technology held more threat than promise. (A weak defense of technology, if I may.) He argued that technology means that things are no longer experienced as having inherent ("intrinsic") properties to which we need to accommodate ourselves; instead they are value-charged. Whereas I think you are using Heidegger to show how the line between technology and body is blurred, my understanding is that for Heidegger technological devices REPLACE the need for bodily skills within a mechanism that does everything for us. Therefore, we, ourselves, lose the skills and capacities that give us our own identity, and, as importantly, we lose a kind of receptivity to the things around us. In other words, Heidegger's main anxiety toward technology, I'd argue, was a loss of agency or "worthwhile-ness." For Heidegger, it seems to me, technology IS artificial, un-human, and threatening.

I agree with you that Johnson's "mundane" is a valuable, generative concept, an ever-evolving, ever-learning "know-how" mechanism, but Heidegger's views on technology seem, rather, essentialized, where technology is fixed. He seems to allow no room for a future evolution of modern technology which remains fixed in its eternal essence, no matter what happens next in human history.

Allisondactyl

Hey Kyle,

Nice work.

While reading the two Johnson chapters, I kept cringing at (and underlining and marking “???” next to) phrases like “Users, being human,” “human concerns,” and “essential communal human qualities” (24 and 25). But apart from a knee-jerk suspicion of anything that sounds even remotely like humanism, I didn’t know exactly why my reactions were so negative—until I listened to your podcast. Your attention to the body as the site where “know-how” or “user-knowledge” resides once it becomes “mundane” brings to light and, I think, challenges (perhaps unintentionally?) one of the more troubling assumptions undergirding Johnson’s argument: namely, that “users” can be distinguished somehow from “technology.” As you say, using technology leads eventually to a “kind of muscle memory, a technological ‘doing’ that is ingrained in my own movement.” I like the way you put this: “my *own* movement.” It emphasizes the way in which that movement (swinging a hammer), which is a product of the technology (the hammer), becomes something that you experience as yours (‘I know how to handle a hammer’ would be one way of putting this), and thus a way of experiencing subjectivity. Our bodies, or at least our bodies in motion, are, we might say, products of technology—something like what Walter Ong means when he argues that writing alters consciousness. (And, of course, writing too is a technologized corporeal act.) Thinking about the implications of your podcast, which seems to me a useful extension of Ong’s arguments via Johnson’s (or vice versa), it becomes rather difficult to identify anything “essentially” human, at least insofar as human “essence” is understood to be something outside of, or other than, technology (i.e. something "natural").

Having said that, I don’t want to short change Johnson, so to speak. His reworking of James Kinneavy’s triangle diagram suggests that the user (and thus the “human,” I suppose) is a kind of field wholly articulated by its relations to systems, designers, and activities. But he doesn’t explore the user in those terms—at least, not in the chapters we read.

Anyway, great job raising some big questions to mull over.

-j.

Hey Kyle,

Great job! Your podcast was easy to follow, clear, and very entertaining. I thought that having music in the backdrop was really interesting, in addition to be very entertaining – maybe I should incorporate that next time?

I, like you, was particularly interested in Johnson’s use of the “mundane,” especially in our everyday lives. I was intrigued by this quote here: “As we go about the activities of our daily lives, doing things repeatedly each day, we internalize these actions and thus make them a part of our unconscious” (3). This quote reminded me of Andy Clark; that is, technology cannot be seen as something separate from ourselves, but we “internalize” our use of technology, thus making it a part of ourselves and our everyday lives.

You make reference to this when you show how we become “part of the life-world.” I think your examination of this make a lot of sense, especially when you parallel it to Hiedegger’s hammer. I agree that when we use a hammer, or other technologies, we never think about how we are using it; rather, because the hammer becomes a part of ourselves, we unconsciously know how to control it. It is the same unconscious action as when we use our arm – something else that is a part of ourselves – to pick up a soda. In both cases, we do not think about the process of picking up a soda or using a hammer, but we just unconsciously control them.

I think, in short, that Johnson’s examination of the “mundane” will force us to reconsider when technology works. Indeed, because technology is a “part of the life-world,” as you say, we are not always cognizant of when it always works. I thought that this was a really interesting point to bring up, especially for the purposes of this class. For instance, we do not always realize how computers, tv, or podcast affect our development as students. It is almost as if the benefits and rewards of these devices go unnoticed. As such, I think that we should realize and become cognizant towards the fact that we are becoming products of the environment in which we live even if we do not know it.

Great work, Kyle!
Steve