Electrons Are Cheap; Society Is Dear

Abstract

The most visible impacts of new communicative technologies are in the attention-grabbing and expressive potential of greater design control at the desktop, hypertext, and multimedia (graphics, animation, video, sound, hap-tics, and ultimately immersive virtual and augmented reality). Nonetheless, the most significant impacts of new communicative technologies are likely to be in the changing activities and communities facilitated by new potentials of transmission, storage, and accessibility that change time, space, memory, informational resources, and economy of social encounter. Beyond providing students with facility in design tools and multi-media rhetoric, teachers of rhetoric need to provide students with analytic tools to understand the chang-ing locations and informational richness of encounters they will be creating, the larger knowledge, social, and activity environments that surround the particular encounter and activity spaces they are working in, and the ways in which communications will mediate transformed work, citizenship, and per-sonal relations. Increasingly, to lead a full and productive life requires learning to navigate, maintain, and constantly reconstruct the built symbolic environ-ment we share with others and which forms the basis of social cooperation in a knowledge society. And a core part of that learning is to understand how that communication, information, and cooperation can support humanly sat-isfying modes of social life. Animals were social before they were communicative. Even coral requires a colony. Animals were social and communicative before they were symbolic; witness ants being led by each other’s pheromones. Animals were social and communicative before they had language; bees dance to direct each other to pollen. Each of these developments in sociality extended the possibilities and range of interaction, cooperation, sharing, and intersubjectivity. Consider the complex and affectionate parent-child relations among advanced mammals,

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