Oversold & Underused: Computers in the Classroom [Book Review]

TLDR: The book does not offer a fluent narrative, as many traditional histories do, and readers may still feel the text to be disruptive as the scene jumps abruptly among Wall Street, Menlo Park, the U.S. patent court, Scientific American, product catalogues, and New York City government.

Abstract: IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2003 financiers when the progress of his technical developments did not meet expectation. When he tried to install the first electric light system in New York, he had to deal with the city government that had its own discourse, rhetoric, and political languages. The Languages of Edison’s Light is filled with these kinds of examples, examples showing how speech acts proceed interactively in the real world. The distinct perspective Bazerman adopts in doing the history of Edison’s perhaps most important invention has great strength. But it has a shortcoming, too. The book does not offer a fluent narrative, as many traditional histories do. Although we can understand why the author juxtaposed apparently unrelated stories, readers may still feel the text to be disruptive as the scene jumps abruptly among Wall Street, Menlo Park, the U.S. patent court, Scientific American, product catalogues, New York City government, the Chicago Exhibition, and General Electric. The different stories are united under a common abstract theme. They do not have obvious causal connections, or at least these connections were not obvious to this reader. Readers should realize that what they are going to encounter is not a comprehensive and integrated account of Edison’s entire career, a period of his career, or an invention of his. What they will read is a collection of chapters that look at the history of Edison’s incandescent light from the viewpoint of communication studies.