English 168.7
FT98
For this unlikely combination of materials (Elmer-DeWitt, Winner, Sculley, Gibson), two topics occur to me. Each asks you to form a critical judgment based on two pieces of reading. Neither involves a "comparison" for its own sake (as in "comparison and contrast"), but each asks you to perform acts of comparison in the service of making a point. Before writing (or completing) paper #3, please cast your eye back on "A Few Notes on Writing Papers of this Kind," on the back of your assignment #2 (also available at our elegantly evolving website).
1. Winner, Sculley
Evaluate Sculley’s projection of an information-rich future in the light of Winner’s critique of "mythinformation." Is his proposal simply an expression of information-age "ideology" (Winner, p. 52), or does he answer some of Winner’s criticisms of the view that "information processing is something valuable in its own right"?
• One way of putting this question might be: "If you were Langdon Winner and were writing another essay like ‘Mythinformation,’ what would you have to say about Sculley’s article and what it typifies?" But this may be to stack the deck against poor Mr. Sculley; it’s not HIS fault that he was CEO of Apple Computer and was paid a modest yearly stipend to promote new information technologies, is it? True, he makes large claims for the power of enhanced information systems to transform societies and "unleash a new Renaissance of discovery and learning," but he ALSO projects "three core technologies" (145) that may help to structure information and avert what Winner calls information "overload" (52).
• You will notice that there’s one point where the two writers’ cases don’t quite meet: Winner challenges the claim that the information revolution promotes "democracy," but Sculley makes his prophecy in the name of "individualism" and "creativity." Are these comparable values? What other values are involved (e.g. national and world prosperity) and what role to they play?
2. Elmer-DeWitt, Gibson
After disclaiming extreme views of what cyberspace may bring in the future, Elmer-DeWitt’s Time article tells us that "real change" may nevertheless be in the works (9). Just what kind of change, he doesn’t tell us.
Okay, suppose Elmer DeWitt and his staff of ghosts at Time , and NOT William Gibson, had invented the term "cyberspace," and suppose Gibson had written "Burning Chrome" as a kind of fictional response to theTime article. What kind of "real change" – or better, changes – does Gibson seem to anticipate? What outcomes mentioned in the Time article seem to have become "real" in Gibson’s picture of a future society? In what ways has Gibson’s future world outpaced or reversedTime’s possible projections?
• Again, not a balanced comparison, since these pieces are of two different genres entirely. Moreover, Gibson is striving for vividness and color, while Time is working for an even-handed presentation of views (or at least pretending to). But try taking Gibson’s story as an answer to the questions implied at the end of Elmer-DeWitt’s article; what does it seem to say about power-relations in the future world and the role of cyberspace in individual and collective life?
• For those who haven’t sampled cyberfiction before, Gibson’s story may be hard going. He’s really following a common convention of science fiction: instead of defining features of a strange new world ("the matrix," "ice," "simstim," even "Chrome" herself), he places them in context and tries to get you to imagine what they are. We will walk through this story in class, but as you read it, it may help you to keep in mind that there’s a rather simple adventure plot here: Bobby and Automatic Jack are questing for forbidden treasure in a world of powerful monsters; Rikki is the love interest whom one of these guys discovers he wants to free from an evil sorceress, as it were; and Chrome . . . Well, who is Chrome, and what is her House of Blue Lights?