An interview with Anthony LaMarca in CPU Magazine, well worth reading and a blog in its own right (alas, you’ll just get a teaser excerpt unless you subscribe to the magazine), led me to what is obviously a founding document of cyberthink, Mark Weiser’s 1991 Scientific American essay on “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Weiser’s essay envisions “a world in which computer interaction casually enhances every room,” one in which computers don’t take us out of reality into a computer-generated space (virtual reality) but augment the spaces we physically inhabit by deploying hundreds of computers–many of them tiny and tailored to specific tasks, and all of them connected via high-speed networks both wired and wireless–into the places we move through during our lives. Weiser terms this vision “embodied virtuality.” The computers don’t take us into their world, but enter ours. For Weiser, the goal is invisibility: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

I’m fascinated by this essay, especially by the futurist scenario that begins with “Sal’s” clock-radio asking if she wants coffee and then takes her and us into an office enhanced by everything from time-zone customization (a window view that can be “set”) to collaborative editing with a colleague who’s sharing a virtual office with her. Weiser’s vision and argument are compelling.

Yet the English professor in me wants to argue back, especially because Weiser’s exhibit “A” of a successful, ubiquitous, invisible technology is writing. I agree that writing is a successful, ubiquitous, invisible technology, but I’ve spent a large part of my adult life trying, sometimes desperately, to make writing a visible technology for my students. (I do the same thing with the movies in my film studies classes.) I do this, of course, because I want to help them become more deliberate, reflective, and effective writers: not just consumers of verbally-delivered information, but thoughtful creators who can not only enter into dense, long-term conversations but decisively intervene in those conversations. Otherwise, it seems to me, their capacity for agency is stunted. Or to put it plainly, they’re less free. (“No easy way to be free,” as Pete Townshend observed.)

My efforts make my students unhappy at first. (Truth to tell, a few remain unhappy, but that may be my fault, not theirs.) When the technology of writing becomes visible to them, they write more slowly, and for a time many of them write less well. The process is no less maddening than if I had asked them to pay scrupulous attention to their breathing. And yet I am convinced that if writing does not become a visible technology for my students, their potential freedom is compromised.

Is there an analogy with computers? Does computing deserve to be as visible, as reflected upon as writing? There’s a continuum here, I think. Not all writing needs to be visible. I don’t need to be deeply reflective about every sentence in a short business email, or about the instructions I read on how to put together knock-down O’Sullivan “furniture.” But some writing needs to be visible, and I have to know how to make it visible to myself, and how to craft writing that not only conveys information but stimulates thinking, for me and my readers as well. Similarly, I think there are times when computing should be boldly visible, when the task should include not only the work and the outcome but also deep reflection about the tools used on the way.

Weiser’s essay ends on a seductively idyllic note:

Most important, ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.

Sometimes that walk should cleanse the mind. Sometimes that walk should focus the mind. Sometimes that walk should be hyper-visible and stimulate the mind in all her powers to acts of creation, preservation, and deep reflection.

We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Thoreau advocates visibility, even for “the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.” In many respects, Walden heroically attempts to drag ubiquity and invisibility into the strong light of moral awareness.

This is a vexing and stimulating dilemma for me.