'm not going to be polite about this: I hate computers. I choose the word, "hate," deliberately, knowing it is unacademic. It is a wild word, but it suits my feelings perfectly. To my colleagues in English who warn against offending my audience, I say this: Sometimes a scream is the best rhetorical strategy.

On the door of a nearby office, I saw a note which read, "Please don't leave without locking the room. Even for a few minutes!! I'm sure none of us wants Mac or printer stolen." I have heard the computer referred to variously as "Mac," "My Mac," and "The Mac." The diminutive, "Mac," makes the machine a pal, like "Bud," a guy's can of beer, always at hand, there when you need someone. "My Mac," the alliterative, adds the apostrophe of possession, and with it, power and status: I master and control this machine, the Rolls Royce of stationery supplies. "The Mac" is another thing entirely. The definite article removes Mac from the human realm altogether, giving it the coarse and strangely threatening ring of a cranky god.

"Please remind your students to wait outside your classroom until your arrival," said a memo about our "Computer Initiative." "This is especially important for those with 8 a.m. classes, as the audio-visual people dislike having to eject our students. As you know, with security an important consideration, it's important not to leave open classrooms with computers in them. . . ." When I walk down the hallway to meet my classes each day, I see in the distance a little mob of students clustered at my classroom door. Before this room was designated a "computer environment," they were free, indeed encouraged, to arrive early, unpack books, compare notes, prepare for the day's work, chat. That has changed. The Mac has moved in, and while the students are locked out, The Mac sits on its cart, not even a jangle of lively parts, but a big sleep of plastic.

I am reminded of a visit I made to the Centre County Prison. The other members of the local prisoners' aid society paused at the entrance, but I automatically grasped and pulled at the massive door handle. It was locked, of course. The sting of denied passage was most unpleasant. Now the open door, part of our academic Bill of Rights, has been defaced by a sign as frightening in its way as the "X" on the door of the Egyptians: "Classroom Locked? In Emergency Call 865-2000."

Emergency is here. Our classrooms and offices, where we share our visions and our lunches, have turned into machine shops where, when they are open, talk centers almost exclusively on how The Mac works and why The Mac doesn't work. We form still-lifes of defeated lumps, hovering over our machines, waiting for the relief of an electronic hum.

When The Mac appeared, uninvited, in my writing class, I asked myself what it and its software could do to deepen and enrich the classroom experience. I found only that The Mac provided yet another opportunity to destroy human contact. Versatile as it is, no computer can compare in versatility with the breadth and depth of human expression. Why invent ways to mechanize my classroom, when the far more urgent task is to humanize it?

"Tell your students that The Mac is just a deluxe typewriter," advised a colleague. Well, I can't do that. When I type at a typewriter, I can look beyond the horizon of the platen to a world larger than and different from me. I experience a rootedness in the world, a sense of reference to it. It is not easy to look beyond the computer when you are working at it. Glance up, and you immediately bump into a television screen. Thinking made visual. Thought, no longer a form of meditation, is now an incarnated amusement, projected onto a monitor, reduced and codified into cute little icons which scramble autonomously about in their nanosecond world. Should I teach my students to be as oddly thrilled by the cartoons of their own thought processes as they are when they view graphs of their heartbeats?

ast semester, one of my students threw up his hands and vowed never to touch a typewriter again. He had seen "how incredibly easy it was to move paragraphs around." His remark, and the drama of it, struck me as an explanation of something I had been noticing about word-processed writing: There are no transitions in it. Does the ease with which beginning writers can move paragraphs around make them more likely to move them around — more often and with less good reason? Doesn't the ability to recognise coherence, the deep-tissue bonding of one idea to another, depend in some critical way on the struggle to wrench ideas apart? If it is too easy to separate paragraphs, it will also be too easy to slap them together.

"The computer read my paper," said the same student who threw his arms into the air. He handed me page after page of rudely interrupted prose, our living language criss- crossed by a verbal grid in the way Renaissance painters superimposed a spatial grid over the living body. If a sentence contained a sequence of three or more items, or totaled more than 30 words, the machine printed "LONG SENTENCE." This: "The exterior of the house was becoming run down, the paint was peeling, the steps were broken, and the windows were very dirty." was a long sentence. At the words "thing" or "seem," the computer jettisoned, "WEAK SENTENCE": "She seemed to enjoy her new freedom." was a weak sentence. The computer also announced that my student's essay contained many words that I, his reader, needing at least a seventh-grade education, might not understand. Among these it listed my own name, the number of the course I was teaching, and the word "cheery." "Come to my office tomorrow," I said to my student, "and we'll talk about what it means to read an essay."

We had a fine talk about the discovery of freedom and the inclination to license he was trying to illustrate in his essay. We talked, too, about the difference between scanning and reading, and I think we agreed that the computer did not read his paper.

Because it names rather than explains, the computer cannot be of much help in achieving insight, accommodating an audience, developing a personal voice, or other matters of style. It can, however, achieve perfection in appearance. The typed page is often flawed, but print-outs can be immaculate. Gone are the blemishes of ink and lead smears, paper-thinning tears from a too-zealous eraser, arrhythmic skips of margin and line, layer upon layer of visual sediment in red, black, blue, green inks. The mess is cleaned up as you go along, like the practice in fancy restaurants of cleaning the ashtrays with such suddenness that smokers are denied the testimony of their own existence in the witness of ash.

I wonder how much intellectual "dirt" — irony, paradox, ambiguity — disappears along with the visual kind. Word processing bears little resemblance to the process of writing as I know it. So neat, so clean, you'd be easily duped into thinking a page was as perfect in content as it was in appearance. Reading somehow defiles it. Approaching it critically is guilt-producing. Actually finding something wrong with it is tantamount to signing your name, as James Joyce says, on the hypotenuse of a right triangle.

The first draft of a piece of writing — and the second and the third — should carry the marks of the tool used in its making: it should express the process its maker undergoes. It should not have the virtue of being finished- for-good, polished clean. It should invite another forming. There are processes which profit from being slow, inefficient, messy, needing to preserve their own history in miscellaneous forms of debris. I think writing is one of those processes. I think a writer needs to make a mess. Our scribblings and scraps constitute our basis for self- examination and criticism, and they bring us as close as we may get to a palpable medium.

For the beginning writer and for those of us who teach beginning writers, The Mac is neither slave nor god. It is rather a cold presence sitting with arms folded, smack in the middle of our lives. No one can convince me that technology is neutral, that it is just tools. Tools reflect the values of the culture from which they emerge. Tools have social effects; they shape social relations. Our judgments about technology should not be merely technical. Questions like "Will it work?" address only part of the issue. We must also ask, "How will I feel about it?" and "How will it affect my connections with other people?"

ome technologies foster or demand an authoritarian structure; others, a more democratic one. Once we have asked all the important questions about the social and political implications of a new technology, and have answered them as fully as we are able, we have a choice to make. A new technology need not be regarded as necessary, no matter how many people are adopting it. Those who accuse opponents of a new tool of being against progress, old- fashioned, or nostalgic, are either arguing ad hominem, or are assuming that the history of technology has developed organically, as a plant develops, each new technique following inevitably from earlier stages. On what grounds can we assume this? On what grounds, moreover, can we assume, as many blindly do, that this history is progressive? Too often, we allow ourselves to be persuaded by the creators, producers, and marketers of new technologies — be they nuclear scientists or car dealers — and then find that by the time a crisis appears, it is too late to take action.

We can and must choose between different kinds of tools, between accepting a tool and rejecting it. Our survival and our humanity depend perhaps more on the tools we refuse to use than upon those we do.

Barbara Anderson-Siebert, a lecturer in the Department of English, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State. Outlook expresses the ideas and opinions of Penn State faculty. Reply is invited.