First, I would like to thank my fellow panelists for the opportunity to work with them. The Interclass experience I shared with Fred and Peter last summer, while it went a different direction than any of us expected, is probably the singlebest pedagogical learning experience I have had to date. And working with Todd in the year since has provided a marvelous chance to ground my own work in a solid theoretical base.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention the other members of what just this morning I learned is known as "The Boys From Bowling Green." Dr. John Clark, and Steve Krause, still at Bowling Green, and Bill Hart-Davidson, now at Purdue, and I have been collaborating on Computers and Writing issues for the better part of two years. The best parts of what you'll hear me say here today are not my ideas, but our ideas.

As you look at the handouts for the Web site I created in conjunction with this presentation I must admit that virtually nothing on the page you have will be mentioned this morning!

My purpose in creating the Website was threefold:

• First, to tell a story, a series of narratives about a graduate Computers-and-Writing seminar I team-taught last summer.
• Second, to carefullly examine CMC terminologies, some familiar and some quite neologistic, which were used (and possibly mis-used) in that class.
• Third and finally, to draw some tentative conclusions about what instructors in similar graduate seminars may need to re-think or re-configure.

In the most recent issue of Computers and Composition, Charles Moran writes in "Notes Toward a Rhetoric of E-Mail,"

As professionals whose particular concern is written communication, we'll have to pedal hard to keep up with the changing medium ... This is one of the most difficult challenges we face as writing teachers in the 1990's: to stay abreast of the changes that are taking place in writing itself."

So, where am I going with this extended metaphor? Well, last summer at this time I left Columbia, Missouri completely enraptured by the litanies of the Tenth Annual Conference on Computers and Writing. Best of all, I was heading home to Bowling Green where I would be team-teaching the aforementioned summer graduate seminar, entitled, Computer Mediated Instruction: Discourses, Literacies, Pedagogies (because all good courses, like all good conference presentations, have a colon in their title!).

It was an opportunity to introduce some of my colleagues to Computers and Writing, and to share in the Interclass experience with Fred's class at Texas Tech and Peter's class at Houston. So much to do in only six weeks! MOOs and MUDs and the Web and the Interclass and — well, again, y'all are the choir. You know the litany.

The first day of the seminar, I made it clear — to return to Moran's metaphor — that we would be pedalling like hell for six weeks. The seminar participants, in turn, made it clear that — well, let me return one final time to the ministry metaphor.

When I was working in professional ministry some seven or eight years ago, primarily with teenagers in Northwest Ohio, a popular t-shirt inscription made the rounds at the youth gatherings. It read, simply:

So ... How Much Sin Can I Get Away With and Still Be Allowed Into Heaven?

Those kids didn't want to join the choir — they just wanted to know precisely enough about faith to satisfy their parents and to qualify them for the improbability of eternal reward. The graduate students in the Bowling Green third of the Interclass, metaphorically speaking, wanted the same information. They didn't want to join the Computers and Writing community — they wanted to know precisely enough about computer-mediated communication to satisfy their administrators, and to qualify them for the academic equivalent of eternal reward — a tenure-track job.

And that, I suppose, is where I might argue with Moran's statement (though, to be fair, he himself labels the passage "An Inconclusion.") Staying abreast of the changes taking place in writing is rather easily (and mistakenly) conflated with staying abreast of the changes taking place in writing tools. I am not accusing Moran of making this error; however, in retrospect, I do believe that the members of the Bowling Green seminar and I both made that error, though from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Universally, they believed that if they learned to use computers as tools they would be instantly qualified to teach writing with computers. Conversely, I believed that once introduced to the theoretical realm of Computers and Writing, they would be instantly overwhelmed by a desire to explore the fact that, as Michael Heim has put it, "Writing with computers is ... well ... different."

My use of the terms "tool" and "realm" just now is not accidental, and in fact is central to my presentation here today. Throughout the six-week seminar, I was consistently amazied at the amount of bifurcation and polarization that occured in class, both face-to-face and, most especially, on the Interclass.

Of course, no one on the Interclass ever claimed an extreme position. For instance, one Texas Tech student noted a confrontation between the Lubbock "interested realists" and the Bowling Green "Luddite technophobes." In response, an Ohioan rejected the label technophobe and set up an equally straw division between Bowling Green's "concerned skeptics" and everyone else, the "fredkempish technophiles." (My congratulations to Fred, who did in fact become an adjective in our class; I personally took being called "fredkempish" as a compliment!)

The we/they us/them division spiralled from there, to include online battles between, among others, Literature and Composition specialists, and for an incredibly uncomfortable day or two, Christians versus Postmodernists.

Now, personally speaking, I've taught both Lit and Comp, I'm both Christian and postmodernist; it seems to me that middle ground is usually possible, if not always terribly comfortable. Which, believe it or not, brings me back to tool/realm.

If you'll permit me a brief interlude of historical contextualization:

Probably the singlemost important rhetorical debate of the last half-century was that engaged by Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz regarding the rhetorical situation.

In 1968, Bitzer published an article entitled, appropriately enough, "The Rhetorical Situation." In it, to grossly oversimplify his argument, he claims that there is such a thing as a "rhetorical situation" which is "out there" for the rhetor to discover and engage. This is an unusually positivistic position for the Humanities, which even then was beginning to dabble in what has come to be called "social constructionism."

Which was the impetus for Vatz's 1973 reply to Bitzer, entitled "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation." In it, and again I must apologize for grossly oversimplifying, he argues that in fact there is no such thing as a pre-existing situation for the rhetor to engage, that in truth it is the responsibility of the effective rhetor to build such a situation using all appropriate rhetorical means.

It was a complete impasse. Positivism was eyeballing Social Constructionism, and the field of rhetoric just warn't big enough for 'em both. That is, until Scott Consigny's brilliant 1974 entry into the foray, "Rhetoric and its situations." Consigny pointed out how Bitzer's rhetor lacks an ability to function in novel or indeterminate situations, while Vatz's rhetor lacks — indeed, does not even require — the ability to discover such situations, for she has what amounts to complete autonomy to create such situations at will.

While Consigny does bind himself to traditional Aristotelian methodology and terminology, his conceptualization of the "topoi" or "commonplaces" of the rhetorical situation allows him to introduce a useful interplay of the stances espoused by Bitzer and Vatz, as he writes,

"The topic functions as both instrument and situation; the instrument with which the rhetor thinks, and the realm in and about which he thinks." (original emphasis)

McLuhan coined the word "interiorization" in his classic The Gutenberg Galaxy in order to describe the process a culture goes through in accepting a new communications technology, and how that process permanently alters the human sensorium at a cultural level. The alphabet (for instance) is such a linear creation that it forced "literate" cultures to rely more on sight than sound.

In a recent issue of Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, I explored this issue further in an article entitled "MOO as Tool, MOO as Realm."

. . . at this moment in history, Western culture exists within the realm of the written word; the tools of writing are so ingrained in our consciousness that the way we see, the way we draw, the way we do math, the very way we exist is affected by the linearity imposed on our (sub)consciousness by our societal literacy. Writing has been interiorized by our society. How do we know when we have moved to this interiorization, have moved from seeing a type of literacy as a tool to existing within it as a realm? McLuhan has claimed that we might accomplish this only with complete hindsight, often the hindsight of many generations.

The answer is clearly "no," and thus there is a need for speculative articles like Moran's. And, as you might guess from my own speculative theorizing, I believe it is clear we are still at a stage of developing computer-based literacies where the "tools" of electronic communication — everything from the antiquated Commodore 64 word processor to multimedia MOOspace — have not by any stretch of the imagination been interiorized.

Our society does not yet exist within the realm of computer-mediated communication. It Will (reference the deterministic AT+T ads) — but as of now and for the foreseeable future we are on the cusp of a tool/realm shift.

And it is precisely that uncomfortable existence on the cusp that leads to the type of nasty stereotyping and name-calling that existed on our interclass. Most of the Bowling Green students, as I have mentioned, were interested in computers in the writing classroom only and specifically as tools for writing as it now exists. And that is fine!

Conversely, early on in the the interclass — the second day, in fact — Fred posted a note explaining that he considered himself a "technopusher" and he suspected that Peter and I felt the same way. I don't wish to speak for Peter, but if by "technopusher" Fred means someone interested in pushing forward to examine how technology is changing writing — how the realm is being constructed/discovered and interiorized — then I am guilty as charged.

And the implications of the word "guilty" lead me back to the name-calling and labelling. With a year's retrospect, I see that all the tool-oriented Interclass participants began using "technophile" as an invective directed largely at Fred and his students, while theory-driven students at Tech pejoratively blasted the Bowling Green and Houston "Luddites" as "technophobes."

Of course, here I begin to commit the same sin I have decried — I am bifurcating the two groups. Recall, I said that nobody on either "side" of the Interclass ever owned up to having an extreme position (except, perhaps, Fred and I who proudly claimed the title of "technopusher"). That, too, is eminently fair and quite to be expected. Our instincts to divide the world into "us" and "them" are evidenced, to use only one arcane example, by the many jokes which begin "There are two kinds of people ... " At the same time, we generally refuse to identify ourselves with either/or of the either/or.

And thus, despite all of Todd's marvelous scholarship on the topic, essentially I am rejecting the term "technophobia" altogether. It connotes "a fear of," and as no one likes to be accused of being afraid, I would opt instead for a different focus — "frustration with."

That is, a lack of control, an inability to immediately establish fruitful patterns of interaction and learning leads not to "technophobia," but to what members of the listproc Megabyte University recently came to call "technofrustration," or more colorfully, to use a term coined by Nick Carbone, "technoflustration."

Technoflustration, then, is a condition arising from network crashes, lost files, mis-keyed commands, information saturation, and many other basical technical problems quite common to the CMC classroom — and all situations which are eminently tool-oriented.

Technoflustration is exacerbated by the writing teacher's inability to communicate with the local technological consultant in ways she can understand. This further separation of the humanist and the technologist is yet another problematic either/or bifurcation; I should point out that Eric Crump gave a marvelous presentation at this year's 4C's, which in part addressed this very issue.

There are, of course, many ways to reduce the tension introduced by the use of accusatory terms like "technophobic." You might do a close linguistic study of the terms as Todd has done; you might attempt to re-define it as Tehranian has done (this is another set of links on the Web I constructed). Or, you might introduce a new term entirely, as I have just suggested.

Regardless, these are only ways to treat symptoms; the larger change — I refuse to say "paradigm shift" — of interiorization is a slow, perhaps generational process.

It may be horrendously frustrating to realize, like McLuhan wrote 30 years ago, that the fully interiorized medium of electronic communication may be a generation or two away. But it is that very realization that will help professionals in the field of "Computers and Writing" (which is not quite yet a redundancy) interact with students who are in class because they "need this line on their vita to get a job." The tool and the realm both already exist, but they do not yet comfortably co-exist; they are not yet interiorized.

You may have noticed that the first screen of the Web I've constructed, reproduced on the handouts, consists largely of three long quotes, including one from Alice in Wonderland, and that the title of this presentation is borrowed liberally from the poem "Jabberwocky" in Through the Looking-Glass. What possible connection does the work of Lewis Carroll have to do with theorizing about technophobia?

Well, I invite you to step through the Interclass with me and find out. There are some good stories there, and more about the theory you've heard here; all of which I expect you'll read differently than I wrote. And after you wander the Web a bit, I hope you'll drop me a note to tell me if you felt at home in the electronic realm I've constructed. Or, if you're planning to take or teach a class like this one, feel free to steal my syllabus, or any of the other tools you find useful. At some point, it may be exactly the same thing.