Reading both of this week’s essays reminded me of our Margaret Atwood conversation about the inevitability of new technologies quickly becoming obsolescent. Brock, Kvansky and Hales’s 2010 essay about Black feminism, social media, and the power of technology struggles to deal with all three broad categories equally, or with even one sufficiently. I came away from the piece wondering if the problem was that the scope of the questions asked was inappropriate for such a short paper, or if Brock et al. were limited by their own astonishment of the newness of the blog form. The laboriousness of the task they set themselves was evident when they wrote, “The limitations of critical technocultural discourse analysis lie primarily in its ability to scale and the strength of the interpretive framework employed. The thick description necessary to connect interface design and ideology leads to lengthy exposition that often decenters the narrative flow of research conducted with this method. Also, the conscious decision to display large chunks of user- generated discourse, while reflecting the methodological desire of representing disadvantaged groups in their own words, must be properly contextualized by the interpretive framework in order to maintain narrative cohesion” (1046). Even as they fumbled over the language to conceptualize and theorize a new medium, I was reminded of the degree to which I take such things for granted today with the Internet always at my fingertips. Similarly, Rettbergs’ earlier essay sounds laughable to our modern ears: it is clearly no longer the case that “only 54 per cent of US households have Internet access”[1] or that Americans spend a half hour each on the Internet and reading newspapers every day (44-45). But our wonder at the pervasiveness of our technology seems to have faded, even as it proliferates at alarming rates. It is notable, though, that even as we take the technology for granted we wonder more about our personal responsibility when using it. What’s hinted at in Rettberg in the evocation of Habermas’s warning about the fragmentation of the public sphere in the digital age (48) now has obvious and material political and social implications that make Rettberg’s evaluation of the conversational strengths of blog comments (34) and Brock et al.’s wonder at the openness of the medium (1052, for example) sound naïve today.
I see two possible implications of the kind of temporal disconnect produced by essays like these. My gut instinct, and my less critical impulse, is to shrug them off as artefacts of the early Internet age that, at best, remind us of how far we’ve come and how quickly, and encourage us to marvel once more at the miracle of our technology until this impulse inevitably wears off. The other option is to consider readings like these as a return to the source, and to mine them to see what kinds of questions shaped the Internet age, and to inquire as to how these questions have evolved in the interim. What struck me as particularly interesting in the Rettberg was the question of co-construction, “that emphasizes the mutual dependencies between technology and culture” (53). It seems that we have crept a bit closer to technological determinism since the time of writing, but it is still useful to remember that we are, so far, ultimately in charge of what happens in the blogosphere, and that we can control (the civility of) our own discourse. We need not, for instance, report on new Tweets as if they are news that springs from a vacuum.
With regards specifically to Americanah (published in 2013, if we want to talk about its place in the timeline of the two essays), the novel illuminates issues the essays barely touched on, if at all. Specifically, Brock et al. bring up commodification in passing when they talk about Time Warner’s purchase of Essence, but the novel demands a more nuanced discussion of the line between commodification and identity-formation. I’m thinking of Ifemelu’s doubt on p. 231: “She should have accepted Letterly magazine’s offer to buy her blog and keep her on as a paid blogger.” I’m thinking of the way that Ifemelu imagines blog titles, and even the opening sentences of posts, in social situations—even after she’s quit the blog—, as if the tool that was once an empowering mode of self-expression has turned into the only lens through which she can view even her personal life. Her automatic blogging impulse seems so contrary to the Wambui’s original encouragement that motivated her to write: “This is so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog” (Adichie 366). What is more, all the ways Ifemelu feels out of place in the second half of the novel, upon her return to Nigeria, problematize what Brock et al. only hint at regarding the accessibility of electronic resources to a diverse readership. To the extent that blogging helps Ifemelu understand her place as “Black in America,” the blog ties her to a public identity that becomes difficult to translate back into the Nigerian way of life.
I hope we’ll talk in class about what such temporally disparate texts can teach us about our current moment. Each of this week’s readings raises a different set of questions about our online and offline identities, but perhaps a common theme is that there will always be a lag between what our technology enables us to do and the critical understanding we have of it. If this is the case, then it is indeed helpful to return to older writers, to remind ourselves of the questions we would bring to our technology if we still did not take it for granted. These kinds of questions, I think, may generate productive skepticism and more awareness of the way the media inevitably changes us.
[1] The most recent Pew statistic that comes up on Google states that as of 2014 this number was closer to 73%.
