| This study examines why the continued belief in the modernist individual as a singular, rational, unified identity limits the potentials of new information technologies in college composition classes. Examining the discourses that construct students' subjectivities and their influence on writing, I argue that the pervasive belief in the individual is culturally produced and can be challenged through synchronous electronic networks. Technoscience has a powerful influence on our sense of identity and as such, it infuses the narratives we tell about ourselves and shapes the possibilities for experience. I therefore examine computer usage in the composition classroom by drawing on feminist, cultural studies, and composition scholars to complicate the discussions about the intersections between technologies and selves. Such a move helps to situate the issues that arise in the classroom in the context of larger institutional structural arrangements that shape the university.;The three sites I have chosen to focus on--composition classrooms, a corporate software publisher, and a community network--follow my own scholarly progression. All three sites illustrate that to question subjectivity involves an engagement with the multiple institutions that not only shape technology usage, but also construct the possible subject positions we can inhabit at the close of the mechanical age. I argue that we need to challenge traditional narratives of self by encouraging collaborative inquiry aided by technologies. |
