I don’t have the title of the CCCC presentation given by Pam Takayoshi, Gail Hawisher, and Cyndi Selfe in front of me, but all three focused on hidden, subordinated, or otherwise alternative literacies associated with computers. I’ll admit that I had just come from a fantastic presentation on mentoring by Emily Bauman, Malkiel Choseed, Jen Lee, and Brenda Whitney, and found myself a bit underwhelmed: the computers-oriented presentations held little of the careful nuance, complex argumentation, and sophisticated reflexive richness of the mentoring presentations, instead favoring a straightforward, unadorned, and eminently practical outlining of real-world research findings. I’ll hasten to point out that this is much more an issue of my own personal preferences regarding academic work than it is any comparison of the relative merits of the two panels: I’ve read enough of the work of Takayoshi, Hawisher, and Selfe to have seen that their scholarship is pretty much unimpeachable. So before I get myself in any more trouble, maybe I’d best just go ahead and describe what I saw.
Pam Takayoshi began her presentation on “Girl Talk Online” by offering some genuinely startling statistics, statistics that were in fact so startling that I wondered about their provenance (and will probably e-mail her and ask where to find them): for example, she suggested that only 2% of teens in the U.S. don’t engage in instant messaging. Can this be true? I find it incredibly difficult to believe that fully 98% of American families are even online, especially given Charlie Moran’s excellent work on access: this would suggest that 98% of American families both live in internet-accessible areas and can afford monthly internet access fees. Frankly, I think this may be a case of not reading statistics closely enough, or polling bias. In any case, Takayoshi presents instant messaging as a widespread practice among teenage girls, an assertion which in its more general form I certainly won’t dispute. What was most interesting were the responses of many of those girls regarding the literate nature of instant messaging: “It’s not writing,” they said. Takayoshi described her surprise at such a response, noting that the entire field and environment of instant messaging seems to her to be constituted by text and textuality. Her thesis: what’s at issue with these girls and their instant messaging practices is the definition of writing itself, especially in response to in-school and out-of-school literate practices. According to Takayoshi, these girls are learning about argument, ethos, audience, and other elements of communication when they IM, but their attention to the surface elements of IM literacy (such colloquialisms as CUL8R, OMG, LOL, WTF, among other things) and using those surface elements to define IM as not-writing suggests a deep and profound split between in-school and out-of-school literacies. Takayoshi then went on to contend that these girls, in their out-of-school literate practices, are “re-embodying a medium which has been theorized as disembodied”, in the ways in which computer technologies seems to materialize lives and bodies in the names given to chat rooms, in the presentation of self in presenting pictures of themselves online (despite their asseverations that appearances don’t matter “except to perverts”), and in their composing “identity cards” or bullet-point “bio profiles” about themselves for other chatters to read.
Gail’s presentation on “Webs of Collaboration: Negotiating Global Literacies of Technology” (I think I mangled her title a bit, but that’s the basic sense of it) offered literacy narratives and life profiles of two asian immigrant students, one from China and the other from Taiwan, and detailed the intersections of their literate practices with computer technologies. I found some of the tangential comments on class interesting, particularly YiHuey’s protestations of a middle-class background despite her parents’ upper-class wealth, status, and professions, and her contention that people only mistake her for upper class because of her excellent education. Consider, also, YiHuey’s remark that “Possessing low computer skills is just like possessing low literacy”: indeed, as they are both instances of facility with a technology viewed as both transcendent and required for upward class mobility. One of Gail’s conclusions (I think she was citing somebody else here) was that we can’t understand literacies without understanding the political, economic and social systems within which those literacies function, and I’m not sure how to read the yet again common presumption of technological transcendence in that conclusion.
Finally, Cyndi offered some of her recent research on one adolescent’s interactions with video games, in a presentation titled “Computer Gaming as Literacy”. Cyndi asks that her handout be directly quoted only with her permission, so I’ll try to talk about her research only in summary and paraphrase, although I hope it’ll be OK with her if I do quote some of her references, particularly James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, from whom she suggests that gaming is “an important semiotic domain [. . .] characterized by multimodal literacies”. Selfe extends from this the contention that computer games teach students certain digital and transnational literacies that formal schooling cannot teach, and these literacies are necessary in today’s global technological economy.
In the question and answer session, Charlie Moran suggested that “schools are not life”, and that Cyndi’s and Pam’s presentations made quite clear how there is an increasing technological divide between school and life, exacerbated by standardized testing. There seemed to be a consensus in the question and answer session that Pam’s instant messaging and Cyndi’s gaming pointed towards an increasingly urgent need to somehow connect student’s out-of-school technological lives with their in-school learning, a consensus that — in its implications — strongly opposes the assimilationist perspective laid out by David Bartholomae in “Inventing the University”. We should not demand that students assimilate into school literacies, the argument from Cyndi and Pam and Charlie seemed to be, but rather that schools come to understand how to accomodate students’ out-of-school technological literacies.
In other words, schools are in danger of becoming outmoded and obsolete in relation to their students’ techno-cultures, and they need to catch up. Despite the wonderful quotation Pam takes from Christina Haas (which, again, I think I’ve mangled a bit), arguing that “the straightforward technological progress model is troubling because past behaviors, practices, and tools are deeply embedded in the present ones” (213 — anybody know the source?), the perspective I’ve just detailed really smacks of technological determinism, because it suggests that technology simply creates the gaming or IM practices that students uncritically adopt in the forward progress of technology and culture, and schools and teachers must subsequently adapt to those cultural and technological practices, lest they be left behind. The advance of technology itself is thereby viewed as transcendent and beyond intervention. In fact, in the question and answer session, Cyndi echoed the all too common economic globalization justification for the instrumental understanding of education, or (to be a little more succinct) the economic rationale for the vocationalization of higher education, suggesting that we need to adapt to a somehow transcendent technology because of the economic processes of globalization and other social movements that are inevitably beyond human intervention. (For bonus points, count the number of awkward nominalizations in the previous sentence, and send your answer to help_mike_eschew_obfuscation@vitia.org: the first correct answer will win everlasting fame and glory.) This evacuation of agency from interactions with technology strikes me as a dangerous way of thinking, and also as something that runs directly counter to the perspective Selfe offers in her excellent Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention.
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