Selfe & Selfe: Politics of the Interface

Selfe, Cynthia L. and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." Computers in the Composition Classroom. Eds. Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elixabeth Overman Smith. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008. 64-85. Print.

Digital Article

So, in a nutshell, this continues the conversation started by Hawisher and Selfe. They build their concern about oppression/power structures through technology with the idea of borders. In moving from a vision of country borders to the borders created by a narrow vision of what the computer should "do," the article shows how something as basic as a pointer can alienate a user. They explain the computer and its interfaces as primarly growing out of a white, male, middle-class, business professional context, which has led to accessibility issues for those that don’t fit into any or all of those categories. There is issue in both the way computers are physically used in minority vs. majority classrooms as well as issues in the enforced cultural standards that the computer design/map/interface has put onto the user. The authors give three suggestions for balancing the power and making the interface more accessible to those unfamiliar with the dominant culture that created it: become technology critics and users, contribute to design (become the teacher/software designer), re-conceive the interface borders.

My thoughts on Selfe & Selfe are a bit scattered, but this is what came up as I was reading:

So what will happen now that much of the computer programming does not happen in the US where English is privileged? The other question is: would the same issues have developed if another country had been center stage for many of the developments? This made me think of a couple of summers ago when I was in Spain, because the ISP was local all of the websites that I pulled up automatically came up in Spanish. I had to go in and manually change Google to US English. I thought it was amazing. Maybe not technologically so, it's pretty simple to understand the how, but it made me happy that everything wasn't so American English-centric.

We’ve seen changes in language availability since this article came out, but it was only in the ‘90’s that people started bringing computers into their homes. We didn’t own one until 2000. I was a sophomore in high school. Before that, I used a typewriter or the library. Technology, regardless of the type, has always been “trickle down.” If you look at VHS, vs. DVD, vs. Blueray. “Eventually” prices come down as they trickle down deeper into the market. People wait for prices to come down on certain luxuries. Until recently, weren’t owning personal computers just a luxury? The computer was initially meant for the military and then the business world before it “invaded” homes. Now that they’re more popular in homes (in fact more people now work from home), do they still hold these values?

I do think that the Selfe's are right in that we need to be critical, but that's the case with most cultural developments and tools. We should always ask: is this the best tool for the job?

This link will take you to the Unicode website. I was interested in what was being done today about such access issues, and despite the fact that when you click on the website it's in English, it does allow much more access than there was to multilingual technology than in 1994.