The Impact of the Relative Availability of Technology

At the 2001 Computers and Writing Conference at Ball State University, I tried to illustrate the potential impact of the relative availability of a particular literacy technology on our experience of reading or listening. At one point I in my presentation, I distributed a one-sheet paper handout that included quotations from works that I was citing in my talk, but I only distributed enough copies of the handout for half the audience members. Earlier, I had distributed a similar handout to each audience member. Now, as the second handout was being distributed to half of the people in the audience, I posed this question: How did the lack of a handout of your own affect your experience of my presentation?

My purpose in intentionally distributing fewer copies of the handout than there were audience members was twofold. First, I hoped to demonstrate (crudely, I realize) that a technology for literacy--in this case, print technology in the form of a printed paper handout--enables and encourages (and perhaps discourages) specific kinds of literate activities and/or behaviors. For example, a printed handout might encourage an audience member in that setting to read silently during the presentation itself. The handout makes available the speaker's words in physical form to be used in ways that they couldn't be used if no handout existed.

Second, I wished to underscore the point that the relative abundance or scarcity of a literacy technology--again, in this case, in the form of the printed handout--influences literate activities and/or behaviors as they occur in a specific setting (in this case, in the forum of a conference presentation); in this sense, the relative availability of the technology helps determine what literacy activities are possible in that instance. For example, in my C&W presentation, the lack of enough handouts for each individual audience member may have discouraged individual silent reading and encouraged sharing--or perhaps prevented certain audience members from reading anything at that point in my talk. In other words, in this instance, how the activity of reading happened was influenced by the technology itself as well as by its availability (or lack thereof).

In addition, to push the point a bit further, because the way in which the print technology is used in this instance (which of course is shaped by the context of the conference presentation), encourages certain kinds of behaviors (such as sharing or perhaps talking with other members of the audience), it influences the relationships among the defacto community of the audience. And this is a crucial point, for the technology and the way it is used have the potential to shape how we relate to one another and, I'd submit, how we understand ourselves with respect to one another and the world we inhabit--that is, our ways of being-in-the-world. And because these technologies become so deeply integrated into our ways of reading and writing and communicating, we are generally unaware of their potentially profound effects.