[Previous entry: "Tiger Stadium"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Appropriation"]

07/08/2004 Archived Entry: "literacy?"

Nice little post at Weblogg-ed about weblogs, wikis, and literacy. What I like about the post is the point regarding the openness of online writing.

In a nutshell, the Internet has changed the requirements of what it means to be literate. While just about everything we used to teach with was a finished, edited text, the Web now provides us with a gazillion unedited texts, which means it's no longer enough just to be able to read; we have to read critically.

I agree with the first part - open texts (not open source) within a network which writers and readers tap into, alter, appropriate, confiscate, download, share, etc. This sounds likea fundamental characteristic of working with new media. The second part I'm not as sure about: "we have to read critically." In this statement, I hear a return to literacy. The power of the first part is that it is imagining something outside of literacy - call it electracy, late age of print, e-literacy, whatever. But the minute we fall back on the vocabulary associated with literacy studies, we aren't completely understanding this something outside of literacy which we are experiencing. I want to call this a new "literacy myth," borrowing Harvey Graff's phrase for a new purpose (since Graff was more interested in the lore surrounding literacy and economic success). This version of the literacy myth applies literacy standards to information technology, aiming for some kind of rational match-up in order to explain how we use and construct knowledge online. The 23 points Weblogg-ed quotes from the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education site provide a good example of the new literacy myth. These are all things one would do offline as well. Hear McLuhan here? We apply the old to the new; we look to the future through a rear view mirror?
New media is not really an extension of literate practices. And it cannot be explained through literacy. As long as we continue to use literacy to explain new media (as Wysocki and Johndan once note) we cannot understand how new media functions. In composition, I don't think we are anywhere near tackling this issue because it will undermine and reconfigure many of the truths we have accepted and hold so dearly. If we are to recognize that literacy no longer exists, what will become of composition studies which bases its identity on the ways writing empowers individuals to be productive members of society (see Brandt, Rose)? What will happen to topic sentences and Writing Centers, professional writing, or the first year textbook? Serious damage. But I don’t really see too many folks trying to understand how we are no longer literate. VV, Ulmer, those who work with affect, (and I always think Barthes was doing this even if he doesn’t say he is). I’m trying to think through all this through the whatever and a piece I’m writing on celebritacy. Still, this is an argument which will not sway many in composition because there is too much invested in literacy, in explaining technology through the language of literacy studies, and in returning time after time to literacy narratives as a way to explain how technology affects knowledge construction (“the first time I used a computer was back in 19…”)

Posted by joanna @ 07/09/2004 09:15 AM EST

John,

I don't want to just cite myself on here, and I don't wait to bust up a very good conversation. . . but I have to weigh in on the M.o.C. documentary that Rushkoff made. Almost two years ago, I posted something to the pre/text list conversation w/ Sirc about this video. Our program actually used this video as a main text, and we brought in Rushkoff to speak to the students themselves. It was soooo interesting, the interaction.

We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this kind of deconstruction is a destruction of certain things that they (shit. . . I/we, for that matter) care about. I know that this isn't your main point in your response here, but I've never, never, never had a more impact-full moment with students than I did with this guy who stood up to Rushkoff and yelled out, "YOU'RE LYING!"

That moment was like a punch in the gut for me. And it never left.

Posted by jenny @ 07/08/2004 11:10 PM EST

Nice exchange, Jeff and Will. I agree with Jeff we need to develop a new conception of literacy, which we may want to call a new literacy. "The Merchants of Cool" shows one form: using video to critique and deconstruct marketing video. That film blows my students away, partly, I think because they so rarely see electronic media used to critique.

As for blogs, at a very basic level, bloggers must attend to typographical design and other graphic elements that are not part of most school-generated texts. In setting up a blog, students have to decide on font sizes and background color and a variety of other choices that become part of how they present themselves--which could take us back to Erving Goffman.

OK--you got me rolling. Good dialogue.

Posted by John L. @ 07/08/2004 10:21 PM EST

All important questions which take time to answer.

I was the Director of the Writing Program at the University of Detroit Mercy. This Fall, I'll be switching over to Wayne State University.

Posted by j @ 07/08/2004 06:48 PM EST

Right...the tools facilitate collaboration and thus change the process and the product meaning literacy changes with it. I guess the deeper question is: What is the value in open texts, and will this shift evolve to be the norm? If we are to prepare our students for THEIR future (and not our past,) is that future rooted in collaborative construction of learning and knowledge? Part of me thinks it is...

Thanks again for kicking this around. BTW, where do you teach?

Posted by Will R. @ 07/08/2004 06:42 PM EST

We tend to have facilities set up for new media (at least at the university level - maybe you can tell me more about k-12). But we often don't work with the logic of new media and instead make the facility mesh with print based logic.

For example, if one has students work with weblogs only so that they can post their homework, why use the weblog? Same with a wiki. If students are just posting essays, we don't need a wiki? But if students are doing something with the wiki that they couldn't do without it - like creating highly networked and interconnected texts, with each other, other courses, other schools - then it seems like we're starting to work with new media differently, right? That also is going to mean that the ways information is created and transfered will shift as well...so that what we used to ask for (literacy) no longer applies as is.

In a wiki-like environment, for instance, that means changing what the composition looks like or does. I often like to point to Everything2.com as one type of example because the sites users are connecting their work, sampling others work, etc to each other in ways few composition textbooks or courses ever allow for.

Posted by j @ 07/08/2004 05:58 PM EST

I clearly get the concept of classrooms where students don't produce closed, authorial texts. I mean this text that you created is in the midst of a collaborative evolution because of my desire to dig into it more deeply and your willingness to engage those thoughts. And I think that concept is really fascinating.

I'm still bumping up against the idea that new media requires a new literacy...not dismissing it, just still not seeing it clearly. And maybe that's because I'm focused on blogs and wikis and syndication and km which is all pretty much still text based.

So let me ask you this...do you think a facility with new media should be required of our students? Or is it more that they already have that facility and we need to adjust our teaching to a different literacy?

Posted by Will Richardson @ 07/08/2004 05:52 PM EST

Hi Will
You write:
"And I wish you would dig deeper into the 'New media is not really an extension of literate practices.'"

If we recognize that print formed a specific apparatus for constructing not just reading/writing practices, but how we organize thought, society, culture (yeah, big claim I know - but very McLuhanist and one I agree with), then we have to recognize the differences new media generates. These differences, I believe, cannot be summed up by the language we use for literacy because literacy is a way of defining print-oriented methods of organizing information, culture, space, etc.

No doubt new media borrows from print - we still use alphabetic writing - but does much more. It's not enough to say "I can make a web page or a Flash animation." Instead, we have to recognize a different logic being used, a different way of organizing thought than print creates. And we have to also see that logic played out in the apparatus, in the structures that organize us - networks that are built within entertainment, media, commerce, etc. Network logic, to me, is a new media logic that is different from literacy. Literacy enforces representation (the classroom teaches it through the thesis statemetn which represents one idea). The network is not representing (even when an MC in the networked world of hip hop yells out "Represent!" - the meaning is different).

Or the example you provide, the open text. An open text is much different than what print creates - closed, authorial creation. The bigger picture would be to imagine an academic setting in which students don't produce closed, authorial (name on your paper/do your own work) writings, but something more open and networked (and by extension, the classroom, too, would take this form).

Posted by j @ 07/08/2004 03:00 PM EST

This is the best of blogs, finding posts that push your own thinking. I'm a little over my head here, but I think I can get to most of what you're saying. I like the concept of a separate "e-literacy," one that redefines what it means to read and to write. And I wish you would dig deeper into the "New media is not really an extension of literate practices. And it cannot be explained through literacy." idea. How are we no longer literate? Because traditional literacies only apply to traditional reading and writing? What then are the characteristics of a new literacy?

I know the read/write web demands a different definition. Not sure what that is yet, though.

Thanks for reading.

Posted by Will Richardson @ 07/08/2004 02:48 PM EST

Let me add:
Graff tells us that 19th century interest in literacy is based on a Christian sense of morality (learning morality through reading and writing). This legacy is with us today as we think about technology. The fear of Internet plagiarism – calling it un-ethical – or what happened on TechRhet a couple months back regarding email names – it’s not appropriate to have a highly sexualized email name – all stem from this continued desire to be moral. Our textbooks are full of morality – both sides of the issue/rational and reasoned arguments – and we cringe at the usage of rhetoric for manipulative purposes even though rhetoric serves that purpose often and successfully. To grasp new media, we have to give up on morality.

Posted by j @ 07/08/2004 10:01 AM EST