I think Inman's point about the relationship between technological practices and President Kennedy’s assertion of America being first to the moon has significant implications about how we think about technology in general. When I really think hard about what landing on the moon really meant for us as a nation, I see no direct benefit. The benefits are all psychological. Did landing on the moon first really prevent Russia from attacking us? Probably not. Did we receive any military advantage at all from landing on the Moon first? Again, probably not.
I guess my point is that the impact of "us" landing on the moon before "them" didn't have a physical consequence in the same way, for example, that creating the first atomic bomb did. I do think, however, that there were definitely cultural consequences (good and bad) that resulted from the event. Perhaps a carry over from the Bombs that ended World War II, I think that America needed reassurance that we were still the strongest, and in order to that we had to be the "first." Thus, getting there first, assured Americans that we were still invulnerable to the instability of the rest of the World. I think this mentality has rippled forward in time in parallel with technological advancement. In other words, I think that part of the drive for technological advancement or even the drive of consumers to have the latest technology derives from the need to be better or the need to be a step ahead of the "others."
Indeed, there seems to be an embedded sense of "us" and "them" in technological implementations. For example, many universities market themselves as having more or better technology available to students compared to other universities. Hardware and software producers also use this paradigm of thought - "Our laptops are 1.3% faster than Dell's." It always comes down to "us" and "them" as well as "more," faster," "smaller," "lighter," etc.
While this mentality seems to have fueled great technological innovation over the past several decades, I think it is important to also think about the consequences of this way of thinking. At what cost - environmental, geo-political, humanitarian, etc. do these great technological innovations come to us. Also, considering these costs, do we have a greater responsibility to use these innovations to create some sort of net gain? I think this has important implications for us as educators. When our institutions insist on investing and reinvesting in technological upgrades, we almost have an obligation to make the most constructive uses of these technological possible.
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I tend to agree that there is a "new frontier" metaphor with regard to technological progress, and undoubtedly certain events in our cultural history, e.g., the Space Race, fit in with that. Admittedly, I think some of our earliest forays into CAI in our discipline were an attempt to self-legitimate in an emphasis on what was 'cutting edge' to show that technology can 'improve' the writing process, yet another form of progress. This has the potential to become one of those technology for technology's sake phenomena in that I agree with your concluding points that we need to make "constructive" use of technology so that progress in the context of writing instruction is more reality than rhetoric.
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