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The most provocative rhetorical moment for any new enterprise is the moment in which someone opines what the enterprise will eventually do, cause, or enable. Inventor Dean Kamen claims that the Segway will revolutionize personal transportation. But we must, of course, wait and see, with varying degrees of anticipation, whether this will indeed come true. And as degrees of anticipation vary, so will the various interpretations that may inhabit the term “revolution.” In any popular cultural innovation one cares to name, there is an explicit or implicit claim about the way that the innovation will “change” or “transform” life, its quality, or its effect. And one of the most prolific generators of pronouncements of future effect has been that enterprise commonly called the “computer revolution.” Because technorhetoric* is a recognized academic field (at least to its several hundred practitioners or one level or another, and to those familiar with its scholarship, which appears in major English journals as well as at least 4 online or print journals devoted to it), whose forward-looking nature renders it prone to pronouncements as to how “things will be”, and because it is important to assess any major enterprise by comparing outcomes to original claims, it follows that techno-rhetoricians have been making reflective and summative assertions about the nature of technological writing instruction. Cynthia Selfe (1999), Barbara Blakely Duffelmeyer (2000), and others have specifically called us to look carefully and critically at the implications of what we are doing as teachers of technologized literacy. We should look at the implications of the technology we use; we should “pay attention” (Selfe) to the intended and unintended consequences arising from our uses of technology; we should teach our students to be critical (Duffelmeyer) of the technologies we use and what those technologies imply. Such statements, while they look forward, also reflect the experiences of the past 20 years of technorhetorical teaching and research. That such reflections are important has recently and amply been supported by, for example, the recent (2003-2004) two-volume 20th anniversary issues of Computers and Composition. Why, therefore, should we not also reflect on what we said would happen, as well as what has happened? Such an investigation has a number of appealing advantages. First, we can see whether those claims have, indeed, come true. If we know whether what we have said will happen did indeed happen, we would then have a useful sense of the accuracy of our predictive mechanisms and the perspective necessary to anticipate change with greater accuracy. Additionally, and more importantly, examining our claims in retrospect can give us a clearer idea about what we were “really” looking toward (as opposed to what we “got”), and in particular, can give us an idea of what we should strive for. Examining predictive claims, therefore, while not without its problems has a twofold benefit—allowing us to more deliberately dream our machine dreams, and perhaps generating a more critical and discerning predictive sensibility. The claims examined in this hypertext are the following: Technology will become Universal. Technology Will Change Reading, Learning, and Scholarship. Technology will Change Literature and Rhetoric. Technology Will Affect Social and Educational Structures. Technology Will Affect Power and Access. ...and may be explored via the button bar to the left or the sitemap button below. * We use the term technorhetoric instead of “computers and writing,” computer-mediated writing,” “computer-mediated composition,” inter alia, because we feel that it’s more euphonious, less cumbersome, and because it has a slightly “futuristic” feel. Whether it will catch on, of course, is part of one of the issues of this hypercontemplation.
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