I think I will soon write an article about the anti-technology rhetorical gestures made in semi-popular academic writings. I blog about thee writings enough. Here’s another gem from today’s Chronicle. This piece, by a Chronicle regular, bemoans wireless technology in the classroom. As proof of its dangers, the author offers an anecdote about students playing with Facebook and Myspace in class, rather than taking notes:

That scenario is happening across the country. Cynthia M. Frisby, associate professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, has noticed students on MySpace and eBay during her lectures. She has also noticed more failing grades. The final straw, she says, came in an e-mail from a student “complimenting my outfit, failing to realize that the time stamp was on the e-mail, further suggesting that he was not paying attention to my lecture.”

How does one respond to this horror? Ban the machines.

Now she bans laptops in her large lecture courses and has a clause in her syllabus about the inappropriate use of technology. The result? “Huge increases in attention and better performance on exams,” she says. “Students have even mentioned that they feel like they are doing better without the laptop.”

We can disect this quasi-syllogistic reasoning: Students have laptops. Students don’t pay attention. We got rid of the laptops. Students now pay attention!

This, of course, is the reverse of the liberatory rhetoric which often surrounds educational computing (just take out the negatives and fill in the positives). But let’s step back a bit as well.

• Students have laptops.
• The laptops are connected to a wireless set-up
• Students experience failing grades
• Thus, the wireless usage of laptops created the failing grade situation

Does this sound logical? Of course not. Do we believe that the entire issue of agency here was reduced to one force, one actor, one thing? What, but the most simplistic argument, would imagine that kind of agency? One more peek at the excerpts before we move on:

• Laptops banned
• Students feel happier
• Performance increased

It’s an interesting move, one which resembles a very cliche version of lifting some kind of obstacle, curtain, chain, from a person so that they can suddenly be free. What you are being freed from might be a romantic ideal (technology) or a repressive force (a larger concern). Apple used this gesture long ago in its famous anti-IBM Super Bowl commercial. That the gesture is not logical, of course, is besides the point. It sounds like logic. Whatever sounds logical, in turn, feels logical.
Near the end of the piece, Roszak, champion of this cliche, chimes in:

“What kids need to learn,” he says, “and what teachers must commit themselves fiercely to defending is the fact that the mind isn’t any sort of machine, that thinking with your own naked wits is a pure animal joy that cannot be programmed, and that great culture begins with an imagination on fire. We should remind our children at every turn that more great literature and more great science were accomplished with the quill pen than by the fastest microchip that will ever be invented.”

I don’t need to repeat the response: even the quill was technology. We know that counter-argument already. And I’m not even engaging in counter-argument here. But just look at how silly this quote is: “naked wits” create “animal joy” when we learn”; “literature and science” are outside of technology.” Who could really believe any of this? We are “animals” and “naked” when we learn? Gut instinct? All knowledge is internal? There are “things” outside of technology, and of all these “things,” science is one? Tell that to a scientist.

The final conclusion to the piece is that we must avoid something called The Sesame Street Syndrome, the idea that there is a right or a wrong answer (the show is described as teaching that kind of logic). Yet, this piece devotes its energy to a fairly typical right/wrong division: Or we have laptops and wireless technology in the classroom (BAD) or we don’t (GOOD). To enhance the GOOD and do away with the BAD, the author has one more old school trick in his bag: behavior. We need to learn how to behave (though we should still be “naked” and “animals” when it comes to learning). Technology makes us misbehave (this is a behavioral determinism):

Jane Drews, information technology security officer for the University of Iowa, believes that a solution to wireless distractions is etiquette education. “From the person who endlessly chats on a phone while in a restaurant, to someone’s pager or cell going off in the middle of a presentation or lecture, we are creating a society of very rude technology users. We have an online class offered to freshmen that includes a ‘Responsible Computing’ module, with a section on ‘netiquette.’ I’ve suggested it be expanded to include classroom etiquette, too.”

This kind of conclusion actually makes sense for the argument presented. In the end, this anti-technology rant I’m describing is a moral argument, not a logical one. I’m bothered. I’m annoyed. I cherish lost values. What came before was good; what exists now is bad. Nothing logical about that, though it masks itself as logic.

One final point: What critics like this argue against - technology leads to a lack of attention, a lack of critical thinking, an inability to focus on the issue at hand, is, in fact, what such critics are doing as well. They are not paying attention to technology, per se, just cliches regarding technology. They are not thinking about larger issues - the ways new media may generate imagination, the complexity of new media, the ways ideas circulate and interact, etc. Which exemplifies a “lack of attention”: a kid IMing in a class or an academic reducing something complex to something simplistic?