I am bad at keeping notes of things to read or do. My to-do lists fly all over the place and eventually get lost. Help me out, blog. Mike Edwards, while reflecting on what was going on twenty years ago, writes:
Twenty years ago, C. Paul Olson wrote an essay called “Who Computes?“ for the edited collection Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power wherein he pointed out that “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is“ (183, emphasis in original). Charles Moran points out that composition still has not adequately responded to the economic critique Olson sets forth in the essay, but the way Olson demonstrates that better machines reduce work by replacing labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes (184) was a starting point for my dissertation.
I ordered the book through the library — now, remember to read this article when I get the book.
I hate when I get a book via ILL and have no memory of what I ordered it for.
On first read, the article seems chiefly concerned with the access concerns Moran’s work does such a good work of addressing (and that, as Moran himself admits, are ultimately unanswerable, and so can at times devolve into little more than rhetorical trump cards in arguments about technology), but once you dig into it, the stuff on the transformation of production and its relation to social structures is insightful, careful, and in many ways more rigorous that Krugman’s perhaps overly facile formulation of “symbolic analysts.”