The Influence of ASCII on the Construction of Internet-Based Knowledge

The intention of this chapter is to engage the deep structures of the hegemony of the digital technology revolution as represented by the internet, levels beneath those addressed by most of the contemporary critical discourses. I am not working with more obvious barriers that constitute the “digital divide” such as the relationship of access to safe drinking water and basic rights of women’s education to global attempts to bridge the digital divide (Nolan, 2000), the future of educational technology in North America (Nolan and Hogbin, 2001), or the potential for zero-cost computing and telephony technologies and indigenous language software environments. The goal is to extend the dialogue to a consideration of the locations of control over which disadvantaged groups of users of communication technologies have little or no control, and even less information or understanding. I am looking not at the content/information/data that is presented through the various media of the internet, but at the bias inherent in the medium itself (Jones, 2000).

The internet is first and foremost a learning environment in both formal and informal learning (Nolan and Weiss, 2002). It is one that presents itself as value neutral; a manifestation of McLuhan’s global village where bias and difference all meld into a stream of bits (McLuhan, 1995). There is a great deal of pedagogy and curriculum about the internet that both challenges and reinforces difference (Cummins and Sayers, 1995; Harasim et al., 1995; Haynes and Holmevik, 1998). But there is very little curriculum or curriculum theorizing that engages the software, code, discourse, and metanarrative of the internet itself, leaving current pedagogy to function in a sea of assumptions about what can be done and said and accomplished online. There is an “antiintellectualism” similar to what Giroux describes as present in the classroom, or lack of interest in the sub-surface discourse of the code and software of the internet (Giroux, 1992: 116; Gray, 2001).