Haraway's theory is a useful starting point for an analysis of the pedagogical role of information technology for two reasons. First of all, she reminds us that technological critiques do not stand outside information technology but in fact helps to constitute such technologies. "Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and human anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other" (Haraway, 164).
Thus the information revolution, like its industrial predecessor, absolutely requires its Luddites just as much as its Watts and Macadams, as it then requires the discourse of and about those positions to achieve its effects. In the second place, Haraway's theory comprehends one of the fundamental aspects of information technology (where technology is understood in its expanded material/conceptual/discursive sense) and which is perhaps the characteristic that renders the information revolution most distinctive: where the industrial revolution instantiated a system of interlocking but nevertheless discrete specializations, information technology is predicated upon interpenetration, a permeability of specializations. Haraway identifies an interrelationship between this function of technology and the increasing interpenetration throughout various sociocultural domains. Her manifesto examines the transformations occurring in a number of social locations: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital and Church, to name just a few, noting that each of these spaces is implied in all the others in the manner of a holographic photograph (170).
I have focussed on the composition classroom because it is frequently a site in which active theorization of the relationship of a technological practice (writing) to other social sites takes place; at the same time it is for this reason often privileged in a way that obscures those relationships. My argument is prompted by the concern that while these strategies together with instrumentalist and specialized critical perspectives are often invoked in pursuit of social goals that I would, by and large, wholeheartedly support, many of these critiques are unwittingly becoming part of a powerful discourse of social consensus and national interest that threatens to undermine those same social goals.
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