Filling the Frontier Void: The Visual Rhetoric of the Personal Computer in Applied Economics, 1981-1988

• In Event: Reuse, Revision, and Repurposing: Across the Lifespan of Digital Communication Technologies, Infrastructures, and Practices

Abstract

In 1982, the nonprofit youth business organization Junior Achievement (JA) launched Applied Economics (AE), a high school course that promised to teach economics, business operations, computer skills, and appreciation for capitalism over a semester. In the early 1980s, increasing mandates for economic education in schools reflected a popular sentiment that individual understanding of market principles was a necessary prerequisite to the nation’s economic success. By 1987, one million American students per year were enrolling in AE courses.

This paper describes how personal computers (initially donated to JA by manufacturers like Xerox, IBM and Hewlett-Packard and subsequently sold to JA chapters at an educational discount) moved from the periphery to the center of the AE curriculum structure, prompting a re-vision of JA imagery to emerge in tandem with a new understanding of digital technologies’ capacity to impart first-hand experiences in business operations to high school students.

To the extent that artifacts and images are purposively employed in order to communicate meaning, they enact a visual rhetoric (Foss, 2008). In the context of the AE curriculum’s focus on abstract principles of business and economics, the personal computer’s very materiality offered a means of visually representing the cultural and social benefits the course promised to deliver.

Indeed, the photographic and textual record of AE’s development and implementation suggests that personal computers served symbolically as a conduit of educational prestige, technological skill, and managerial identity. The increasing centrality of personal computers in AE visual materials reflected a gradual shift toward digital simulations in the course’s content that, it was hoped, could transform students’ attitudes toward business by imparting first-hand experiences of competitive markets. Yet, factors like funding and implicit technical knowledge influence disparate outcomes for digital technology in the classrooms of disadvantaged communities (Cuban, 2003); some JA chapters struggled to get, keep and maintain their personal computers, and to use and troubleshoot JA software.

The AE case, then, permits consideration of how an institutional vision of better, wiser economic citizens called forth by simulated experiences of the marketplace became tied to donated, repurposed, and sometimes obsolete digital technologies.

Author

• Caroline Jack, Cornell U