An Introduction and a Disclaimer
Writing about technology in the 21st century is a tricky business. It’s the ultimate exercise in humility: knowing that as soon as your fingers press the keys, those same keystrokes may function in a new, or newly obsolete, way before your words are even published. Combine this with trying to discuss technology and how it can be used in any one specific discipline and you’re liable to feel like a dog chasing his tail, always a step behind until you’re too dizzy to keep running.
Indeed, discussing, studying, or writing about technology today is so transient that it has the power to take ideas that are immediately refreshing and exciting, and quickly turn them into antiquated ideals of hope that can only materialize if nothing new is developed before you figure out the first edition. As a result, writing this article is a bit like writing a placard for a museum exhibit.
So why bother writing anything at all?
The simple answer is that this article, and the resulting conversation, is not about new technology at all, but about the study of the conversation itself; the heart of rhetoric. What you are viewing here is a museum-in-progress, a real-time archiving of what we think we know and what we think we’re going to do about it.
The first lesson that Web 2.0 technology teaches us, then, is that no data—however immediately obsolete—is ever useless. Conversation is writing is text is data, and Google’s mission “to organize the world’s data and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google, 2008) coupled with its high stock value provides enough justification for why the conversation (and ownership of the conversation) is worthwhile and necessary.
But even as we discuss evolving technologies, what purpose do we fulfill by trying to apply any one particular technology to any one particular discipline, especially one as contested as the field of composition? The question is an interesting and necessary one, but increasingly misleading.
Our goal should never be what technology can teach us, but how using it and discussing it can help us produce our own community-specific knowledge that can be used with or without a computer. As I aim to demonstrate in this article, using technology is no longer merely an activity we engage in, but a space that we—and our colleagues, students, family, and long-lost friends—occupy and live in.
So ignore, if you like, the potentially pretentious title of this article: promising, yet again, that technology can offer us something newer and better than before. Perhaps it’s not best to fall into the same old trap of exploring what technology can do for us in the field, lest we move into the same circular motion of always trying to catch up to the next best thing, a technology or our tail.
Instead, I invite you to think about what collaboration can teach us about technology, because the heart of our current cutting edge technologies is the interaction and conversation that we’re having with each other. Without these interactions and conversations our favorite websites and technologies wouldn’t even exist. So with a clean conscience that what I wrote at the top is now firmly cemented in the past tense, I welcome the real conversation that takes place when texts are composed, friends are made, and knowledge is produced.
