Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited

Conclusion: "Hybrid and Transgressive Literacy Practices on the Web"
  by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe

Hawisher and Selfe's conclusion mainly explores online “identity formations and their connections to online literacy practices” (277). The conclusion is derived from the chapters because in those chapters

we find hints about the postmodern nature of the online literacy practices described in the chapters of this collection – and we see why the modernist narrative of the global village seems increasingly inadequate to the task of containing, explaining, or representing postmodern identities (either collectively or individually) as they are constructed through the literacy practices the authors describe. (281)
Yet Hawisher and Selfe look for more than mere “hints” of the postmodern identities created in online literacy practices, and through a combination of the
concepts of blurred identity, transgressions, and hybridity, [the chapters] suggest a distinctly postmodern redrawing of the Web landscape.  This redrawing admits to the increasingly global identity of the Web, but denies the colonial erasure associated with the global village as a formation that serves the interests of highly technologized nation states in the west. In place of the global-village narrative, the combined constellations of blurred identity + transgressive cyborgs + hybridity suggests an alternative landscape – one that is dynamic, unstable, and peopled by individuals and groups who form and reform according to multiplied defined identities. [. . .] These shifting collections of individuals (many of whom belong to many more than one such group) are characterized by literacy practices and exchanges which cut across traditional national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries, but who also retain both cultural specificity and a value on difference. (287-289)
So because the chapters provide evidence for rejecting the global village narrative and for redefining online identities, Hawisher and Selfe's conclusion can explore
the messy complexity – and the oftentimes contradictory nature – of these new literacies [which] suggests [. . .] a more complicated postmodern vision.  This new vision recognizes online literacy practices not only as responses to the disintegration of conventional world-views, world orders, and social formations based on a modernist framework, but also as an important primary means of creating and expressing identities in changing postmodern landscapes.  (277)
Hawisher and Selfe eventually depict these postmodern identities as fragmented, yet they assert that such fragmentation
is not an end point of the conflicts and transgressions reflected in the literacy practices on the Web; fragmentation does not tell the whole story. The postmodern identities represented in the literacy practices we see in this collection also generate a productive hybridity, new meanings and identities continually assembled and reassembled through language and literate exchange. In sum, the alternative vision we offer within these pages celebrates the dynamic capacity of transgressive identities that are generated within, and through, literacy practices on the Web.  (288)
As such, the Web is recognized as beneficial and dynamic, despite the consumerism and Westernized culture that it also conveys. The Web is finally depicted as containing the seeds for its growth into a shared, international cyber-landscape where people, in all our diversity and fluid identities, can interact.