Selfe's Essay Summary

Cynthia Selfe's 1999 Essay "Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution: Images of Technology and the Nature of Change" is directed toward her fellow English teachers addressing the subject of new technology leading to social progress. Selfe points out the inconsistancies between the romanticized myths of progress and reality. With the information presented she challenges other English teachers to be "educating students to be critically informed technology scholars rather than simply expert technology users" (322). She breaks down the commonly misinformed ideas of technology and progress into three stories (narratives), and they are as followed.

Narrative 1: The Global Village--The Electronic Colony
The first is what she calls the "Global Village". This story claims that all people of the world are connected and cooperating:

[T]he computer network that spans the globe will serve to erase meaningless geopolitical borders, eliminating racial and ethnic differences, re-establish a historical familial relationship which binds together the peoples of the world regardless of race, ethnicity, or location (294).

However, Selfe believes if you look at real world advertisements you see that this idea is not true, you actually see a colony. She presents five ads, looking at the people displayed in the posters; they are dressed in traditional garb and seem to be helpless and we as the advanced Americans need to help them. We are supposed to be connected to them through our technologies but they are a world away the strange and different people are a spectacle like tourist destinations to be ooed and awed at by us sophisticated Americans.

Narrative 2 : Land of Equal Oppertunity--Land of Difference
In this story oppertunity and accessability is open to everyone, but,

[Our] cultrtal experience, indeed, thells us something very dierent--that america is the land of oppertuity only for some people. The history of slavery in this country, the history of deaf education, women's sufferage, immigratiion, and labor unions remind us of this fact; as do our current experiences with povery, the differential school graduation rate for blacks and whites and Hispanics, [and] the fact that we have never had a woman President...oppertunity is a commodity generally limited to privileged groups within this country (304).

Narrative 3: The Un-gendered Utopia--The Same Old Gendered Stuff Selfe describes how Americans wish to have this ramantic (idealistic) ideal about the internet being cross-genderal. The idea goes that computers are new and non gender specific therefore there should be an equal opertunity for both geders to use it and be represented. However this idea is untrue, Selfe points out that computers are used by and directed twords primarily males. Also she presents that even when we try to spread out of our historical gender specific roles we can't help but fall back into them becaouse they are so deeply ingrained into thaoughs and ways we cannot escape them. She states, "we find ourselves, as a culture, ill equipped to cope with the canges that this Un-gendered Utopia narrative necessitates" (306). By this she means that thoughout our history we difine our genders not only physically but by the roles that they play in society, by changing up the historical roles we lose what it means to be male or female therefore to preserve our gender identities we uncounciously fall back into the traditional roles