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Frankenstein in the University
5/28/2008
"You are my creator, but I am your master...." -- Frankenstein's monsterWhy was the story of Frankenstein so compelling to nineteenth-century audiences, and why are similar stories still engaging today? The escape of Frankenstein's monster from the lab represents technology out of control, a theme that resonated with nineteenth century readers who were witnessing industrialization. It continues to be a compelling subject for modern Americans in a high technology society. In the once popular movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronauts are deliberately murdered by "HAL," the infamous on-board computer. In The Terminator series, robots from a not-too-distant future return to the present in a bid to kill off humanity. And in the oft-cited movie The Matrix, the traditional relationship of machines serving man is flipped upside down: an advanced network uses unwitting humans as its power source.
Despite the popularity of these narratives in mass culture, they don't have much truck among academics. For example, almost all historians reject the idea that technology follows its own internal logic (or illogic), independent of human agency. And most historians are hesitant to write what they call "hard determinist" narratives that paint machines as the sole drivers of historical change. Instead of embracing a reductive theory of hard determinism, historians are more apt to adopt "soft" determinist approaches, where technology is seen as only one among many other social, economic and political forces that shape human destiny.
Yet in our daily encounters with technology, in settings where we don't interact with monster robots but with the more quotidian machines of life and work, there often runs a thread of anxiety about how much control we actually have over our machines. Recent developments in university life are especially suggestive that human inventions are controlling the way people teach and learn -- especially when it comes to media technologies, distance learning, and software that has been purchased from vendors.
New Media
Emerging media like podcasting, instant messaging, and increased use of videos can trigger visions of technological determinism. Of course we have the option to ignore or adopt these technologies when we teach. And in claiming this option we're retaining the human agency that dissolves the prospect of hard determinism. But what we do individually may be overshadowed by the larger cognitive transformation that is often attributed to this media by technology critics.
This transformation is commonly described as follows. The university used to place a very strong premium on the virtues of reading and writing and cultivated an ideal of an educated student who was highly skilled in these competencies. As my freshman composition instructor once advised me "Read a lot and write a lot." Universities emphasized such skills because writing and print culture were thought to foster a type of deliberative, sequential, and individualized thought upon which reason and enlightenment flourished.
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