I also wonder about our (sub)concious responses to an article like Selfe and Selfe. As white, middle-classers (and not as the “other”), an argument like theirs is ultimately a personal affront to us, calling us colonialists incapable of global or inclusive thinking. We are ethnocentrics, they’re saying. So when we have reactionary or critical responses to an article like “The Politics of the Interface,” are we responding intellectually to a weak argument? Or are we responding defensively to an attack against our very being? I found the latter to be the case a couple of years ago when I was taking a postcolonial literature class. I found myself taken aback again and again by my peers’ refusal or inability (subconscious or not) to engage many of the texts because they were always going into the text with their “dukes up,” so to speak, reading the texts in a defensive mode, ready to criticize first, therefore rarely ever taking a moment to self-reflect on how the text was, perhaps, speaking to or about them or influencing their personal (not academic/intellectual) reactions.

Again, I hope nothing I am saying here will cause either of you to take offense. I’m just always curious about mine and my peers’ reaction to a text like this that essentially calls us out—the white, middle-classers (both male and female in this case). Is it true? Are the authors validated? Is the argument completely off-base? And as for interfaces, specifically, could developers add, in the initial setting up of a new computer or digital device, a user’s option to customize the “desktop” interface (even beyond your device’s primary-language selection) to something more conducive to each user and their social, gender, economic, and cultural status? Is an option like that necessary? How much do the “other” users care? Is the fact that I just asked that question—how much do they really care—perpetuating the very perspective and language Selfe and Selfe are writing about?