Writing in the Age of Speed

Abstract

This dissertation argues that speed characterizes the world of technology in the twenty-first century. The ideologies inherent in technologies have always been of enormous interest to historians, philosophers, and political scientists. More recently, due to the penetration of electronic technologies into the human cultural experience and, inevitably, into the composition and rhetoric classroom, English Studies scholars have begun to investigate this relationship as well. Although speed has been identified as one characteristic of the Internet era, I propose that it is instead foundational. As an historical review of the arrival of new technologies reveals, speed is inextricably connected to technology and to narratives of progress. Scholars interrogating speed, such as Virillio, Gurak, and Ericksen, have clustered at one of two ends of a response spectrum: speed is either good or bad. However, I argue for a more nuanced approach to understanding speed- and explore both the characteristics of a culture dominated by speed and the effects upon writing and the teaching of writing.

After an examination of speed as cultural dominant and its inevitable imbrication with globalism, I describe the characteristics of speed culture and its citizens and develop the concept of time zones through which some speed culture citizens move fluently, while others do not. Access to knowledge and access to technology ensure zone fluency and I demonstrate that speed culture's assumptions about access increase the barriers to zone fluidity.

I argue that the effects of speed culture on writing are especially significant for scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric. I explore how writing is shaped within speed culture by developing the concept of speed-sponsored literacies: literacies dependent upon values of speed culture evident in the testing emphases of American Education and the federal government's cynical promotion of the "No Child Left Behind Act" in contrast to literacies dependent upon the logic of the network. Writing itself, I argue, is being remade because of the demand for speed literacy. As teachers and scholars of composition and rhetoric move towards an understanding of the notion of speed literacy, they will be better able to work with students - and each other - to engender the essential critical literacies necessary in the age of speed.