Selfe – Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution

There is no doubt in my mind that the great majority of Americans view technology as an asset that improves their daily lives. It is also a blatant fact that many Americans are beginning to see a shift in our culture that will most likely turn into a dramatic change. As we all know, change is something that is usually thoroughly embraced or completely rejected, and that same principle applies to the mixed feelings countless Americans have towards the change technology is introducing.

Cynthia L. Selfe (a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Ohio State University) broached this sensitive subject in her 1999 book, “Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution” and she fairly points out and describes the “contradictory impulses” Americans have when thinking about technology (par 4). Cleverly, she does this through her dissection of common advertisements, revealing the “cultural stories” we unconsciously apply to them and how those “stories” can “reveal to us the complications of our feelings toward technology and illustrate how these feelings are played out in the shared landscape of our lived experiences” (par 11). In other words, Selfe is saying that she can display where our mixed feelings about technology (being that although Americans “strongly believe in the beneficial ways that technology promises…we fear the effects of technology” on our familiar culture (par 3).) come from and why we feel that way, from something as simple as some ads we see on a daily basis. She takes us through step by step by revealing 3 “narratives” (or as she defines them: reflections of “a portion of our collective American cultural imagination” [par 1 pg 294]) that she names “Global Village and the Electronic Colony”, “Land of Equal Opportunity and Land of Difference”, and “The Ungendered Utopia and The Same Old Gendered Stuff”.

Through these narratives Selfe means to expose several facts. One being that: Americans unconsciously reject the idea of a world where all are equal because they unknowingly view themselves on top or as the “sophisticated minds…behind the technology” (par 1, pg 299). Selfe shows us ads that are specifically saying that the world is one place and we are all a one people. But at the same time they show people who look and seem especially foreign, but more than that they seem beneath us, uncivilized, unindustrialized, ect. Selfe does a wonderful job of explaining how these ads are contradictory and how they are affecting our thought process as Americans.

Another fact she reveals is that Americans fancy themselves the “construct[ors]” of an “electronic landscape” where “equity, opportunity, and access” is “open to everybody–male and female, regardless of color, class, or connection” (par 5 and 6. page 301). So Selfe believes that many Americans like to believe that through technology we (specifically Americans) are creating a place where every human is truly equal and seen as an intellectual mind who may offer new ideas and outlooks versus some person of a specific group of people who carry certain stereotypes and generalities to have put against their ideas. Selfe also brings in the fact that we like to say we are an “ungendered” society, where men and women are looked at as equals but that we continue to show ourselves images of the “perfect family” with the stay at home mom, the working father, and the 2-3 happy children. She explains that Americans are looking beyond what we know is there (both parents must work nowadays, divorce and single parents, the optimism we once had “has given way” to the sad outlook of the 90’s, ect) to imagine we are apart of a picture-perfect nation. In a way we are making ourselves look good on the outside, but continuing what our cultural has taught us to believe as badness on the inside.

In a nut shell, Selfe is telling us that she believes the reason we love technology is because of how much it helps us in our day to day needs, and that we have had a long history of technology being nothing but an asset; but we fear the changes because we have this pretty picture in our minds, placed by our culture, that America is almost a wonderful utopia and to change it may prove disastrous.