Technological Enlightenment

As someone who tends to embrace technology wholeheartedly, this week’s exploratory assignment (and in particular, working with Kyle) complicated my relationship with the intersection of technology and text. One thing I hadn’t noticed until Kyle pointed it out to me was the way in which I sometimes anthropomorphised the technology using terms like “Alex provides” and “Alex suggests” or “Alex demonstrates,” when adding in content for our exploratory. 

Throughout that process, I had managed to (as I tend to do) allow the technology to become transparent, and overlook the agency of the user when interacting with it. Perhaps my brain has been rewired by my Chromebook, so I’ve gotten used to and fond of the idea of working within the constraints of certain technologies to discover accessible means of incorporating technology into my teaching, but I found it interesting in this case that I was so easily able to view the functions of Alex as a way of providing for me, removing my own agency in the process. The tools we utilized this week put the onus on us to make their output into something useful, which I pieced together more and more as we went through the Internet Archive and the Google Ngram, both of which seemed far more dependent on the end-user to put something in and get something of use back out. 


Naturally, this depended on an ability to comprehend the readings at hand and know what to do with them. For instance, knowing the content of (selections of) Wollstonecraft’s piece meant having a meaningful lens to interpret the results I got from Alex, whereas the exact opposite proved true for the Internet Archive and Vico’s alternative text. In short, my ability to get anything from Alex, the Internet Archive, or Ngram was wholly dependent on the lens I chose to examine them from and the data I put into the system. I tend to view technology as invisible and transparent since I’m always so thoroughly committed to it in my work, and rather than seeing it as an entity dependent on my input, I tend to view the technology I interact with as its own separate entity, which I never really noticed until I started working on this exploratory assignment. I never used any of these tools previously, so it was fascinating to be introduced to them, and the flashy newness of them somehow masked my ability to see them as dependent on my own input and ability to be critical of their output.

In this way, I see some clear connections between my stance on technology and Vico’s critique of Cartesianism, or philosophical critique. Vico seems to be arguing throughout his piece against Cartesianism and/or philosophical critique for the ways in which it can discourage individual approaches to learning. Whereas it is easily possible to put information in and get information and/or visualizations out of Ngram, Internet Archive, or Alex, starting and stopping at these points would be akin to the Cartesian method of moving from axiom to proof; start with idea, plug it into the resources available online, end with data, assume both are correct in the context of the technology. In particular, I felt that the Internet Archive was able to discourage making quick, possibly Cartesian moves from one idea or approach to the next. While its lack of ability to visualize and/or provide simple ways of understanding the data made Internet Archive a far less attractive option in contrast to Ngram and Alex, it also encourages self-directed discovery of information by skipping the pretense that it provides anything more than suggested directions to pursue the desired knowledge with markers showing where terms appear in the full text of a given piece. Based on my own baseline understandings of Vico’s work, it would seem that the Internet Archive provides a worthy counterpoint to the “Cartesian” approaches taken by Ngram and Alex  (Ngram especially) to provide relatively empirical data about the texts analyzed, potentially discouraging individual analysis and pushing beyond “input data, analyze results.” It is for precisely this reason I found these tools fascinating (the ability to use language to generate graphs and charts), but beginning and ending there has potential to be damaging.

To push this in another direction, I can also see some connections to Kant’s definition of Enlightenment, spelled out as: “Man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another” (41). Defining tools like Alex, Ngram, and Internet Archive as “another” casts them potentially disabling tools, keeping users away from a form of “enlightenment.” Rather than focus on the implication then that these tools would be established in this case as a means of “anti-enlightenment,” I’d prefer to tie it back to my initial point that allowing these tools to become a one-stop source and/or transparent to the user may lead to a “self-imposed immaturity” that creates a cycle of defaulting to the tools and technology intended to enhance our understanding of texts as opposed to a helpful means of supplementing or challenging our understandings. This tension between technology (something I am very much reliant on, for better or worse) and knowledge feels reminiscent (to me at least) of the tensions between rhetoric and science in the Enlightenment. As Bizzell and Herzberg note, “before the end of the seventeenth century, however, traditional rhetoric came under attack by adherents of the new science, who claimed that rhetoric obscured truth by encouraging the use of ornamented rather than plain, direct language” (792). This back and forth between an established guardian of knowledge and an othered approach to making meaning is familiar to me in my own work with technology and teaching, and while I can see the risks involved with relying on the “ornamented” approach of using technology to teach and compose, I am nonetheless aware of its potential value for those interested in pushing beyond mere ornamentation. Users interested in Ngram, Alex, or the Internet Archive as a means for complementing or complicating and understanding may find themselves more in line with the idea of “Enlightenment” as outlined by Kant, and avoiding the “Cartesian” understanding attacked by Vico.

I’d also like to add as a concluding statement here that I’m aware of how much my previous blog post seemed to skew the direction of the conversation, so I’ve waited to post this reply in the hopes of avoiding poisoning the well. I will add as well that due to the difficulty of these texts (for me personally, anyway), understanding how they functioned as a cohesive bunch was exceptionally difficult for me, and I have no doubt that some of my connections between the tools we used for this week’s exploratory exercise and the Enlightenment texts are tenuous, but they’ve helped me to make sense of both… and hopefully not in such a way that I’ve gotten the completely wrong idea about all of them. I was apprehensive about creating another post simply because a point I had apparently unknowingly made turned out to be a major point of emphasis for so many others out there, so I hope this time I’ve managed to both process this week’s exploratory assignment in a helpful way and kept from causing any controversy as well.