question for Dr. Sam: have we been reading (and will we continue to read stuff) in roughly chronological order? 

some of them seem so old, partly because we’ve been talking about all these issues and things for so long now… gender is a thing. and it matters. and it’s political and personal and important. technology is enmeshed in this lots of ways. but so what? and what can we do about it? well, Brady Aschauer goes over what some people have been doing about it. I liked the turn in her historical overview, here where she says, “Dissatisfied with simply noting these patterns, philosophers, historiographers, sociologists of science and technology began to plot the reasons for the patterns along the axes of historical neglect and material misuse. Searching for the hows and whys of gendered work led them to recover and reclaim two distinctly different types of women’s experiences with technology” (9). seems a good beginning. research is always political too, though. and I’m glad she also eventually recognizes and critiques the essentialism in some of the research there.

it’s also cool that she discusses writing as a technology, and rhetoric as a technology. I don’t think we talk about that enough.

—

as a postscript: oh boy would this Chapman fellow be even more worried about our attention spans now, after thirty years of this internet thing. and who knows what he’d say about mobile devices.

I also don’t know if his print/visual divide is valid anymore. tv and newspapers are both old fashioned at this point.