Volume 1, Number 1

Moulthrop and Kaplan question cultural context

In "Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition," Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop question the failure of Marcia Peoples Halio to discuss relavant cultural context in her article "Student Writing: Can the Machine Maim the Message?":

<1> Finally, theories about perceptions and attitudes require careful attention to the entire cultural context (see Kling). As part of this context the hands on computer training and the documentation students receive may have significant effects on their attitudes and performance. A descriptive approach would be an appropriate way to study cultural context if it includes sufficient and relevant detail not only about computing instruction but also about the more general computing environment at the institution. It is insufficient to note, as Halio does, that students in both test conditions "receive equal amounts of training" (17). This assertion tells nothing about what aspects of the operating systems and available applications the training addressed. If Macintosh instruction included help with fonts, typefaces, imported graphics, and the like, whereas IBM instruction did not, we might expect that students using the one machine would have been more likely to try out such features than students in the other.

<2> Similarly, a user's perceptions of a machine's seriousness and a user's choices as a writer (selecting one topic or target audience rather than another, for example) might be correlated by qualitative methods, including attitudinal surveys and analyses of the physical and instructional settings within which writers work. The researcher would have to determine the origins of features in the computing environment. Here Halio's work reveals important misconceptions. Halio claims that "[students] have nicknamed the printers . . . Happy, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy and Bashful" (18) and concluded that the names proved students considered the Macintosh a toy. But she was in error. Halio apparently failed to understand that an individual user does not supply the name for the printer: those in charge of networks assign names to printing devices so that the software running the network can differentiate among them.

<3> Managers' attitudes toward machines may influence students' perceptions of their work environment. If supervisors or consultants complain about the "dumbing down" of the Macintosh interface, some inexperienced users might indeed take the machine less seriously. Likewise, if managers denigrate MSDOS or UNIX as arcane and authoritarian, users new to these systems could be quick to find them frustrating and constricting. It might be very interesting to study such cultural phenomena, but any study would have to address more than one setting in order to reveal general correlations. Not all institutions and managers hold the same attitudes. The names network managers give devices, for instance, vary considerably from setting to setting. At Cornell and Yale Universities, printers in Macintosh facilities have such prosaic names as Printer A and ImageWriter 6 while at Carnegie Mellon University all printers, regardless of which computer system they attach to, have colorful monikers like Maple, Birch, and Dangermouse. These institutional differences suggest that any responsible account of relationships between machines and users' habits must situate the machines and their users in a broadly conceived culture of use. (260-261) Return to the critiques of Halio. Move on to Moulthrop and Kaplan's Works Cited.
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