Mar 2nd 10 Posted by justin in WRT624

Brooke – Lingua Fracta – Ch. 1 “Interface”

Lingua Fracta:  Towards a Rhetoric of New Media

Collin Gifford Brooke

Chapter One:  Interface

Wow.  A lot of stuff in this chapter.  I’ll be brief, but I don’t want to miss much!

• Brooke begins by sketching how an electronic essay entitled “Hypertext is Dead,” published in Kairos acted as not only a single text object, but also as something more – a new media text.
• A main claim of Brooke’s work:  “I believe that, as teachers and students of writing, scholars in composition and rhetoric are indeed uniquely positioned to contribute to discussions and debates about new media.  Such contributions, however, depend on our ability to rethink some of our own cherished and unexamined assumptions about writing:  new media will transform our understandings of rhetoric as thoroughly as our training and expertise in rhetoric can effect a similar impact in discussions of new media” (5).
• Using Wysocki’s assertion that scholarship either takes the form of “writing about isolated texts and writing about the broad contexts and functioning of media structures in general” Brooke then considers the history of criticism in English departments to highlight a key point:  both New Criticism and Continental theory are two sides of the same coin. . . here’s how:  a close reading of a particular object depends on some prior “theoretical commitment” by the critic; at the same time the usefulness of a theoretical perspective depends on its applicability to an individual text and the individual critic’s act of hermeneutic interpretation (10).
• To bridge this divide, Brooke advocates the interface as a new way to discuss the things that happen in between the individual textual object and the broad, generalized structures often characterized as abstractedly impractical.
• We have become accustomed to practicing this sort of New New Criticism (the simultaneous practice of New Criticism and Continental Theory) because of the static nature of the standardized print publication.  So, what to do when New Media begins to erode this shared sense of criticism based on static content?
• Because New Media disrupts this static conception of the text approached from New Critical and Continental perspectives, the development of a rhetoric of new media must avoid “examining the choices that have already been made by writers” and instead concentrate on preparing writers to “make our own choices” (15).
• Brooke also considers Jay David Bolter’s theorization of remediation in this chapter to demonstrate that while partially valuable and valid, Bolter’s articulation of new media falls pretty to the same issue that the New New Criticism encounters:  the transportation of an old medium’s rhetoric onto a new medium’s rhetoric.  In other words, remediation defers the question of new media back to older media by choosing to understand new media in old media formats.
• According to Brooke, instead of being reactionary, theories of new media rhetoric should be actionairy in that they should “prepare us for sorting through the strategies, practices, and tactics available to us and even for inventing new ones.  It is the difference between studying the finished products of others and preparing to generate our own” (22).
• Adopting the interface as the “ever-elastic middle” that includes, “incorporates, and indeed constitutes” the outside, Brooke sees the interface as a space of elasticity and reconfiguration that shapes static products like books, articles, and essays, but is ever ongoing in the in-between level (25).

Jan 27th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – Spilka et.al.

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication:  21^st Century Theory and Practice – ed. Rachel Spilka

Introduction – Rachel Spilka

• The author notes that the collection is valuable because work contexts and modes of production have changes so much over recent memory.  As technical communicators, Spilka notes that the need to adopt evolution is necessary to survive.
• Evolution not only in technical skill, but productive flow and socializing forces are necessary to be a technical communicator now and in the near future.
• She chooses the term “digital literacy” for the text because it “refers a bit more directly to the rise of computer techn0ology, and the introduction of computer technology” that led to the fundamental paradigm shift in tech comm.
• Structure of book:
  • Part I:  Transformations in work due to the digital environment
  • Part II:  New Foundational Knowledge:  What knowledge is important for tech. comm. To learn in order to remain relevant?
  • Part III:  New Directions:  This section is a collection of meditations on how we might revise existing theory and develop new theory to better understand how technology has transformed our work.

Computers and Technical Communication in the 21^st Century – Saul Carliner

• The chapter describes the development of different communicative/publishing technologies and how that has transformed the work of technical communicators.  Specifically, the author considers a couple of time periods:
  • Late 1970s – Large systems, technical writers, field experience for education, wordsmithing tech documents is essential skill, worked on typewriters
  • Mid to Late 1980s – Mid range systems and PCs, called “information developer,” required tech comm. Experience and possible university education, prepared information for end user, used automated text processing systems that resembled HTML
  • Late 1990s to early 2000s – PCs, high-end software for commercial application, called “software engineers” and “technical writers,”  degrees in computer science and wordsmithing experience, prepared information for end user, used web-based authoring systems, desktop publishing, no coding
  • Early 2000s to now – Software for managing networks and information on networks, customization of networks, same names as previous category, required degrees and wordsmithing experience, also experience with CMSs, designing large databases is primary responsibility, used CMSs that work on DITA standards (Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
  • The author grounds the development of technology in the same period of changing technological communication above in 5 phases:
    • Automation of production tasks:  use of typewriters, and more advanced printing mechanisms
    • Desktop Revolution – Desktop publishing addressed issues of output on crappy printing, formatting of documents, and graphics
    • The GUI Revolution – development of GUI to replace text based interfaces (think DOS to Windows)
    • Web 1.0 – static web content is generated through scripting languages like HTML and PHP.  Also the development and adoption of CMSs.
    • Web 2.0 – CMS as a way to manage dynamic content, interactivity, elearning applications and creation, open source software and a strengthening of division between web designers and web coders/producers.

Chapter Two – The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work – R. Stanley Dicks

• First, let me say that I may not agree with the article’s logic, but I LOVED this article.
• The author considers the changing nature of tech comm. In the context of a couple of different aspects:
  • Economics – macro-changes in economic systems of distribution and production have changed the role of technical communicators.
  • Management – new management theories over the past couple of years affect the role of technical communicator in reminding management of their relevance.
  • Methodologies – the nature of “knowledge work” has changed dramatically.  These new production methods have also affected the role of the technical communicator and their respective workspace.
• Economics – A lot of this information is covered in Spinuzzi’s explanation of changing work methods found here (see the section on Chapter Six:  Is Our Network Learning?).
  • The new movement to knowledge work is fundamentally wrapped up in a new value of customer experience and individualization.  New products will be specific to specific people, no copies will proliferate.  Mass production will die in favor of customizable products that meet multiple customer needs.
  • This is referred to as the “support economy.”  Because the customer-corporation relationship is currently poisoned, new modes of customer prioritization will appear (and are appearing).  Web 2.0 technologies are allowing instant feedback mechanisms that will force companies to care about their customer in a much increased way.
  • There are problems with this new model; most notably, because work will become a new experience each time it is performed (as opposed to production models), the knowledge worker will be left looking for new work at the completion of each individual project.  This is a precarious place to be – especially in light of insurance, etc.  Contractor agencies look like a future alternative for knowledge workers in a modular production model (Spinuzzi 2007).
• Management Principles – These come and go; however, tech. communicators need to know how to make themselves relevant in changing management paradigms.
  • Value added – tech. communicators need to demonstrate how they add value to their company by highlighting how they can reduce costs, avoid costs, enhance revenue and by their intangible contributions.
  • Reengineering – Think Office Space.  You remember the mangament gurus that came in to evaluate how successful the company is?  That’s “reingeneering.”  It also goes by names like restructuring – Ford just did a bit of this, so did GM.  The author traces reengineering to the transition from industrial capitalism to knowledge-work capitalism or post-capitalist models of distribution and consumption.
  • To combat outsourcing, downsizing, and rightsizing, tech. communicators should make sure they are doing knowledge work and not commodity work.
  • Globalization is changing things – REALLY? – to combat this tech. communicators need to move away from commodity work toward knowledge work (no filling out forms and getting into coding/design), develop more efficient technologies of development, and understand that translation and localization are the future (other languages, relevant to small contexts).
  • Flattening – layers of management aren’t needed in post-production models.  So, remove management and let teams perform complex tasks together.  Sounds good in theory if everyone is an egalitarian!
• Methodologies – these are the new ways that technical communicators need to engage with their work of production, deployment, and teamwork to remain relevant:
  • Single sourcing – a concept whereby individualized documentation will accompany products in the new support economy.  Databases will query small amounts of information and reassemble them per the end document designers code.  This is the future and highlights the split in workflow between documentation and presentation or writer/interface producer.
  • Agile Development Methods – These are new ways of development that put the end user in the driver’s seat with respect to development.  User-centered design, iterative design, agile development, extreme programming, and scrum all either develop criteria and develop from there (rather than via technical specifications), or use “stories” of end-users to dream new coding.  Tech. communicators need to enmesh themselves in all these processes to remain relevant and be able to fully understand what they are expected to document in a team-based work atmosphere.
  • Distributed work – because of the advance in communicative technologies and contract work, tech. communicators need to understand how to work in non co-located environments.
  • Web 2.0 – This poses an interesting question for documentation specialists.  Why not let the documentation get generated organically instead of exhaustively documenting everything?  You can do this via blogs or user wikis with support.  LOTS of companies are moving in this direction.

Chapter Three – Shaped and Shaping Tools:  The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies – Dave Clark

• This chapter is about “how do technical communicators learn about and assess “broader implications” and “potential influence”?  To answer this question, the author explores what methods and technological approaches have been articulated to consider the ways that technologies structure, shape, and influence the ways we communicate.
• The first section defines technology – or attempts to anyway.  The author wants to get away from instrumentalist (tools to an end) conception of technology.  The author also works hard to differentiate the rhetoric of technology from the rhetoric of science by noting how the rhetoric of technology is primarily concerned with human-made objects whereas the rhetoric of science often deals with “nature.”  To differentiate between the two, Clark notes:
  • Science produces mostly symbols through rhetorical means such as articles or grant proposals whereas technology aims at producing objects and material processes (but doesn’t science also?!?)
  • Scientists validate their findings by outside professionals whereas technologists protect trade secrets and let market forces determine success
  • Science has a “more closely bounded rhetorical terrain” whereas technologies must enlist the help of publics to be functional and carried through to fruition (91).
• Focuses and Approaches to the rhetoric of technology – the author notes that four modes/methods have been used to study technology rhetorically:
  • Rhetorical analysis – a rhetorical perspective for analyzing the problems and issues raised by new technologies through an examination of public discourse.
  • Technology transfer and diffusion – a really diverse field across disciplines, this considers how technologies are transported between populations.  Interested in such things as technology adoption and practice in new contexts.
  • Genre theory – focuses on the rhetorical construction of the writing produced and encouraged by particular tools.  This deals with things like “genre ecologies” (Nardi) and Spinuzzi’s work on the role of genres in technical communication / organizational communication.
  • Activity theory – a form of analysis that can provide a broad cultural understanding because it considers common language, structure, and context in understanding organizational cause-effect relationships.

Chapter Nine – Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations:  Digital Being in the Workplace World – Steven Katz and Vicki Rhodes

• This chapter considers how ethical frames define human-machine operations.  In so doing it asks questions about : What are the relations?  How are they shifting in digital communication?  What are some of the professional implications of the digital relationships of machines and the humans who increasingly depend and exist alongside them in all walks of life? (231).
• Utilizing a successive framing method, the authors describe the following conceptions of technology and ethics:
  • False frame – technology isn’t valuable, it’s just a form of indulgence and entertainment.
  • Tool Frame – Technology is a means to an end – the instrumentalist approach – examples might be a calculator or a hammer.
  • Means-End frame – Technology is both a means and the end of those means.  An example might be something like a website to generate internet sales.
  • Autonomous frame – technology becomes a value system whereby means-ends relationships are conceived as operating unto themselves.  In this sense, technology produces moral codes (productivity, speed, efficiency).  “Societies whose economic goals are the accumulation of material things, wealth, and power, require and enforce the complementary ethical values of speed, productivity, and efficiency as ends as well as means”  (234).
  • Thought frame – technology as rational calculation – In this frame, technological rationality through the assistive technologies of something like Microsoft Word are important because they have become integrated into the composing process.  They are technologically embedded to a really high degree.  Examples are uses of terminology that permeates everything.
  • Being frame – this is when technological thoughts become the dominant mode of consciousness.  Modern technology becomes a way to order nature and our relation to it.  This considers humans as resources or a “standing reserve”  to be harvested.  In this process of Enframing (we only understand being in the world through technological ways – Heidegger), the personal is the technological. . . not just business.  Think of iPhones, Blackberries, Facebook, etc.  We exist everywhere with technology as technology; we stand with resources as a reserve.  Think of the department “human resources!”
• Digital being – This is the accumulation of all frames of being.  It rationalizes the technological order and naturalizes it so that it can only increase.
• To combat these frames, the authors argue for “human-machine sanctity” or the constitution of a new frame that encompasses all previous frames but also values the “I-Thou” technological relation as one based on reciprocity and mutual respect.  This is a reintroduction of the human to the technological.
• “Because human-machine sanctity, ideally, would be based on non-technical relations – not on means-end, but on reverence and caring for the whole – it would directly improve relations between:  employee and employer, employee and machine (equipment), company and clients, and company and nature (conservation).

Oct 16th 09 Posted by justin in CCR751

CCR751 – Dinerstein – Swinging The Machine

Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine:  Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: UMASS Press, 2003.

Introduction:  Bodies and Machines

Dinerstein provides a framework for understanding his work in this first section.  He notes that he is interested in exploring an “aesthetics of acceleration” – or a demonstration of the way that A.A. cultural forms constitute any American claim of being an “accelerated” culture.  But what is accelerated?  D. says it is comprised of the “sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace” (7).  Later, he claims that the term “machine aesthetics” is key to understanding the human experience between the world wars.  Next, D. offers a definition of technology.  He states that,
“Technological” here refers not only to industrial innovations and mechanical rhythms, but also to the ongoing changes in human perception brought on by the experience of modernity.  The social function of nearly all A.A. musical practice before 1945 was to create a public forum that  provided the following:  social bonding through music and dance, an opportunity to create an individual style within a collective form, and a dense rhythmic wave that imparts ‘participatory consciousnesses to the audience. (8).

Dinerstein’s main thesis throughout the rest of the chapter seems to posit that machine aesthetics, embodied by the manufacturing/technofuturist craze of Italian futurists and mavens of industry during the 1920s and 1930s were countered by the embodied machine aesthetics of jazz and swing dancing.  This human machine aesthetic was necessitated by a need for taking one’s body back from the machine.  Central to this concern was the role of rhythm.  In order to fight the machine aesthetic, American’s adopted West African-derived cultural aesthetics that embodied the rhythm of the machine.  In understanding the role of rhythm, D. traces the evolution of two main narratives in the introduction: 1) the story of the industrial revolution and technological innovation and 2) the cultural influence of black migration.  The cultural and material productions of the era were rooted in one of two technologies – 1) technology (the industrial technology created by European-descent Americans) and 2) survival technologies (the “public rituals of music, dance, storytelling, and sermonizing that create a forum for existential affirmation through physicality, spirituality, joy and sexuality – “somebodieness” as some A.A. preachers call it – against the dominant’s society’s attempts to eviscerate one’s individuality and cultural heritage” – the eviscerator here being “machine aesthetics” of the Modernist era.  The rest of the intro discusses how this “survival technology” is embodied in swing music and dance of the era between the two world wars and how this music and expressive technology were embodied and created in the A.A. experience.

Chapter One:  The Tempo of Life is Out of Control. . . and Then Righted

Chapter One discusses how the white, liberal attitude of folks in the interwar period were fundamentally afraid of the acceleration occurring in the daily life of most Americans.  Because of rapid industrialization, many social theorists and philosophers bemoaned the mechanicazation or machination of the human condition.  This is most obvious in Marx’s discussion of the machine.  In response to these fears, swing music and incorporated this acceleration into its discourse.  Instead of seeing the roar of industrial urbanities – like Rebecca Harding Davis’ bleak Life in the Iron Mills – the “New American Tempo” incorporated the accelerated noise into music.  Dance, in turn, also used tap and other forms to weave acceleration into new cultural forms.  The symphony orchestra, with its lack of real improvisation, provided an accelerated musical analog to the factory of the early 20^th century.

Chapter Two:  The Jazz Train and American Musical Modernity

Chapter two investigates the “locomotive onomatopoeia” embodied in train song and dance.  The train, as the central metaphor for progress (for white Americans) and freedom (for Black Americans) became the defining locomotive symbol in the Modern era.  As such, the train found its way into jazz, blues, and symphony orchestras.  It also found its way into dance through tap.  As D. notes, “By putting the train into music, musicians enabled listeners and dancers to ‘wear’ their cultural identity through an embrace of technology, optimism, speed, and power in the form of big-band swing” (73).  The train becomes incorporated into popular culture through the figures of “train” men like Superman (more powerful than a locomotive) and the Steel Man on the Prairie.  In a final take away from the chapter, D. notes that, “three elements are intertwined in big-band swing culture:  A.A. musical practices integrate locomotive onomatopoeia; the machine aesthetics of music and dance help fuel the nation’s imagination; and social (and caste) stratification reify the exclusion of blacks in the nation’s songs and movies” (102).

Chapter Three:  A.A. Modernism and the Techno-Dialogic:  From John Henry to Duke Ellington

Chapter three begins by describing an interesting space that many early 20^th century social critics found themselves:  if the prevailing view of Blacks is that of a slower, lazy race, how in the world could they produce music like jazz?  In answering this question, D. explores two key aspects of A.A. music:  the call-and-response nature of the compositions and the dialogic relationship between the music and technology of the era.  The call-and-response model of West African oral composition finds many analogs in jazz.  This identification creates a social musical product – something to be explored, danced, felt, physicaled rather than something to passively consume (classical/Victorian).  In addition to call-and-response, the techno-dialogic functioned prominently in A.A. music during the interwar period.  The techno-dialogic is “an artistic bridge between self-expression and the technological soundscape” (116) or “my term for revealing how the presence (or ‘voice’) of machinery became integral to the cultural production of A.A. storytellers, dancers, blues singers, and jazz musicians” (126).  In other words, the techno-dialogic is the integration of technology into the expressive traditions of the people – in this case jazz.  So, as technological discourses permeated early 20^th century lives and experiences, the music took up those discourses and included them in the compositions of A.A.’s.

Chapter Four:  Swinging the Machines:  Big Bands and Streamliner Trains

Chapter Four traces how big band swing and streamliner trains represented two sides of the technodialogic coin.  Whereas the horse and buggy had served as the “natural” rhythm of folks in the 19^th century, the locomotive created the natural rhythm of many in the 20^th.  Because of a loss of faith in the machine throughout the Depression era, many Americans were wary of machinized life.  Soon, corporations realized the problem wasn’t the creation of materials for folks that they didn’t want, but poorly marketed existing materials.  In other words, an image problem.  Through some smart marketing, streamliner trains became symbols of the nation’s industrial past retooled for the future, gleaming new physical body blending human and machine attributes.  The big band was itself an icon of humanized machine aesthetics:  it generated waves of musical energy that served to rejuvenate human agency and a sense of renewed physicality in the face of human obsolescence (140-1).  These two creations were technodialogic melds that assured many Americans against the threat of over mechanization.

Observations:

1. Music, for the author, serves as a response to the material conditions of reality.
2. A.A. created a motorized form of music that met the demands of a motorized (read mechanized in both accounts) world.  This is why the music of A.A. during the interwar period (and ever since) has effectively represented an ever-technologizing society.
3. Trains meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people in this time period.  For Black men, it meant a way to escape to freedom.  For Black women, it represented abandonment.  For most folks, the train was an embodiment of the mechanized future.  This was cyborged when the train went from locomotive to Streamliner.
4. The techno-dialogic, as traced from John Henry forward, is a central component to A.A. cultural production.  This is seen in jazz, blues, and numerous dance forms.  Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman and others stole this techno-dialogic and used it to produce wildly popular films/productions for white America.  These productions set American’s at ease with post-Depression technologies and primed them for the tech race that was to occur after WWII.
5. A.A. cultural productions of the period are liberatory.  Even though the A.A. musical experience of the interwar period represented an integration of the machine into the rhythm and tempo of the song, the music at the same time allowed human beings to incorporate those rhythms and tempos into physically embodied technologies of dance – notably tap.
6. The European American cultural productions of the era – those that occur in chapter 5 – reflect the completely soulless, non-embodied machinations of a Modernist-fascinated population . . . a swing without any humanness.

Oct 12th 09 Posted by justin in Uncategorized

CCR751 – Sinclair – Technology and the A.A. Experience

Sinclair, Bruce. Technology and the African-American Experience:  Needs and Opportunities for Study. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Introduction:  Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology

List format today in the interest of brevity.

1. Perceptions about inventiveness and natural aptitude have played a huge role in pushing the A.A. technological experience to the borders of accepted thought.  This is why A.A. are largely absent from the technological conversation.  In keeping with this theme, the work of slavery (brute force) was tied to mental capacity; hence, whites were able to tell themselves it was OK to continue slavery because A.A.’s were incapable of learning/thinking anyway.
2. White identity has long been tied to technological capability.  This is inherent not only in the Yankee ingenuity, but also in concepts of manifest destiny.  Because of the success of the democratic project in the US, whites conceived of technological aptitude and progress as a natural element of their masculinity (which means that technology was also gendered in addition to being raced).
3. “All down these long decade, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans made technology and the capacity for its skillful management central both to the task of nation-building and to the way they represented themselves.  Just as plainly, they contrasted themselves to people of color, whom they judged incapable of such things” (5).
4. Sinclair has a list of things he thinks historians and scholars should concentrate on to improve the historical explication of the intersection of race and technology.  These include:
   1. Search out all black inventors
   2. Look at the world of labor
   3. Look at the world of consumption – in other words, how have Black consumption practices played a role in the development of new technologies?
   4. How is race represented in the media?  How is it represented in different kinds of technological media?
   5. A study of black scientific and technical institutions
   6. A more complex exploration of A.A. participation in technical and industrial expositions.
   7. The author notes that deciding what to write about when reclaiming A.A. experience with technology “rests on what we imagine it is possible to write about” (13).
   8. The author makes a great point that technological advances are created out of choices, not abstract neutral technological logic or neutral process; hence, the social process that informed those choice embody the interests, positions, and attitudes of the ones that created them.  SO, the takeaway is that technology is NOT neutral.

Chapter One:  Landscapes of Technology Transfer:  Rice Cultivation and African Continuities

Judith Carney

In this article, Carney advances the argument that West African slaves were the real reason why much rice cultivation shifted from inland river based rice cultivation to eventual tidal cultivation.  Though historians have long contended that this was because of Dutch influence, the likely reality was that Africans and Europeans (in unequal power relations with one another) combined their knowledges to further develop the rice cultivation along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts.  In reclaiming this history, Carney contends that Eurocentric views have contributed to the glossing over of Africans contribution to this agrarian economy.

Chapter Two:  “To Collect Proof of Colored Talent and Ingenuity”:  African-American Invention and Innovation

Portia James

In this chapter James presents a catalogue of A.A. technological innovations from the period between 1619-1930.  Here are some highlights:

1. In the early colonial period, A.A., white wage workers and slave owners tended to work together to come up with technological innovations to common problems; however, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the black-white line became more pronounced, this cooperation ended abruptly.
2. Until the passage of the 13^th and 14^th amendments, it was virtually impossible for slaves or A.A. freedmen to apply for and receive a patent.  Though the patent office was in New York, and hence, the Union, blacks were rarely granted patents.
3. Before heavy industrialization in the late 19^th century, much A.A. technological innovation was concentrated in skilled knowledge of everyday processes (butter churns, etc.) and agrarian technologies.
4. Before said industrialization, Blacks were:
   1. Interested in improving their lot through technology just like whites
   2. Those A.A.’s who were particularly skilled for invention tended to gravitate to urban areas and where, hence, well situated for the technological advances of the late 19^th century industrial re-revolution.
   3. The railroad was the most powerful and significant developing technology for Black inventors.
   4. A.A.’s saw technological development and invention as a means to gain access to participation and inclusion in the Great America of the pre WWI period.
   5. A.A. during the early 20^th century had to develop marketing and manufacturing savvy to become industrialists instead of just inventors.
   6. Besides racial prejudice, $ was the chief limiters for A.A. inventors to gain access to manufacture.
   7. The two most important take aways from the study are:
      1. A.A. men and women have been active participants in the history of American technology from the very beginning (66).
      2. A.A. stories disrupt the lie that A.A.’s were naturally mentally inferior human beings.

Chapter Four:  New South, New North:  Region, Ideology, and Access in Industrial Education

Nina Lerman

This chapter explored the differences between “Industrial Education” models in the South and North during the Reconstruction period.  According to the author, her article,
“suggests that the paradoxes of industrial education spring from – and must be explained in terms of – contradictions between the various perceived potentials of the A.A. labor force in New South industrial development; the tradition of large-scale production through hand cultivation in Southern agriculture; the steady technological marginalization of the A.A. community in the urban North; and Northern Philanthropy’s funding of educational programs in ongoing conversation with Southern leaders” (80).

So, let’s break this apart:

1. New South industrial development – Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute presented themselves as a place for A.A. men to get a Christian education while learning some skills of industrial trades.  In fact, Tuskegee was THE Southern industrial training facility during the Reconstruction period.  What is odd about this is that Washington used Northern Philanthropic $ to train these A.A. men.  Presumably, Northern industrialists wanted to eventually use the South as an industrial home without the union presence of the North.  In training for industry, Washington was teaching his students to be obedient to the whim of industry. .. .. and NOT get involved in labor.
2. Northern trade schools – such as ICY – started out in the industrial model; however, after matriarchs and other influential community organizers died out or left the education scene in Northern cities, schools such as ICY usually changed their mission from one of industrial trade’s education to Christian moral-influenced teaching schools.  In fact, ICY – citing Tuskegee as an example – created an out of the city campus for its students.  They then trained their students to be teachers that would eventually work in the South educating in trades and domestic duties.

This seems to be the contradiction that the author points out at the beginning of her article.  The takeaway here is that “Industrial Education” as the counterpart to “Black Colleges” cannot be conceived of in a national sense; rather, they must be taken on their own, local terms to understand exactly what motivations/desires were at work.

Chapter Six:  Raising Fish with a Song:  Technology, Chanteys, and African Americans in the Atlantic Menhaden Fishery

Barbara Garrity-Blake

Blake analyzes the expressive practices of A.A. Menhaden fisherman in this piece.  Essentially, she contends that A.A.’s used singing as a technological device for a couple of reasons:

1. The work song as technology not only functioned as a tool to get the job done, it signified:  the words expressed resistance to white authority, freedom to seek new wage-labor employment, and the desire to be home with loved ones (114).
2. The author characterizes this as a “invisible technology”

Chapter Eight:  “The Open Road”:  Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years

Kathleen Franz

This article investigates the use of the automobile by Black American’s in the period between the end of WWI and the end of WWII.  Some points of interest:

1. This essay investigates the automobile as an instrument of cultural power that offered black middle-class drivers access to both personal mobility and technological expertise. (132)
2. Cultural histories of technology that focus on material culture, users, and consumption suggest two ways to expand the scope of A.A. history
   1. Because consumption is a highly political form of technological use, studies of consumption can reveal a lot about the condition of a group.
   2. Studies of how the black community appropriated technological artifacts can highlight the importance of technological skill and knowledge within larger arguments about racial progress – in this case, the historian will use the A.A. experience with automobility to demonstrate how A.A. found their ways into discourses of economic prosperity, leisured mobility, and technological know-how. (132-3)
   3. Discourses of economic prosperity
      1. i.      A.A. used the automobile to take part in the growing middle class identity in the US in the postwar years.
      2. Leisured moibility – to participate in the middle-class ideal, A.A. used the automobile to gain access to the “Open Road” – even though the road wasn’t so open at all.
      3. Technological knowhow – A.A.’s used the automobile to challenge the discourses surrounding Black mental inferiority.

Chapter Nine:  The Matter of Race in Histories of American Technology

Rebecca Herzig

Herzig makes the argument that race, much like gender, is tied to technological development.  After demonstrating the gendered nature of the Ford Probe at the beginning of the article, Herzig notes that technology does a couple of things:

1. Narratives of technology provide a means by which individuals establish separate alternative racial identities.
2. Technologies also offer a key to resolving character’s “true” racial identity in moments of crisis.
3. Social constructions of race often ignore the materiality of race.
4. Thinking of race and technology and their relationships to one another provides better history and allow us to ask new questions about the past.
5. Thinking about the relations between race and technology grounds discussions about both in the realm of politics, not historiography.