Words for a Brave New World: A Review of Literacies and Technologies
Literacies and Technologies: A Reader for Contemporary Writersby Robert P. Yagelski
Addison Wesley Longman, 2001
ISBN: 0-321-05118-1. 593 pp., $38.00

Review by Keith Dorwick
University of Louisiana at Lafayette


For classes that focus on the Internet, television, and other media, the genre of "technoreader" can be quite helpful. In these readers, the critical issues and concerns raised by the use of technology become themselves relevant to the the classroom and subjects for discussion and writing assignments. One new addition to this field is Robert P. Yagelski's Literacies and Technologies: A Reader for Contemporary Writers. In his preface, he notes that "students are surrounded by an astonishing array of powerful technologies for writing, reading, and communicating unimaginable even a decade ago. . . . In the midst of these rapid technological changes, the challenge for students to write effectively is greater than ever" (xi). This is certainly true in the brave new world in which we and our students find ourselves writing. When I first began to teach, if I wanted a student to send e-mail, I had to teach that student how to send e-mail. The knowledge of webpages could not be assumed; students had to be taught how to read and to write webtexts. Today, it is rare that I have to teach how to send e-mail, and many of my students have webpages. Increasingly, what technology I do teach is often at a higher level, and a basic knowledge of technology, at least in my classroom, can be assumed in my planning.

Where I spend most of my time these days is discussing the rhetoric of these technologies: since my students often know how to send real time chat in Yahoo, AOL and Netscape on their own, how do I help them do so more effectively, to be rhetors of e-mail and of instant messages?

Yagelski's text is, simply, quite useful for students and teachers alike in teaching this new literacy. First, the book is arranged topically; these include such subdivisions of content areas into chapters such as "Technology, Literacy, and Progress" and the excellent "Literacy, Technology, and Identity." While these are simply quite useful to the busy teacher hurriedly preparing her semester, who could simply choose to assign the readings in chapters and work through all of the readings in a given section, my usual reaction to such topical arrangements is to sigh and to make my own reading lists. However, in the case of this text, many of the connections between readings within a given chapter are so coherent and complex, so clearly carefully thought through, that I would assign them as is, not at all my given pedagogical practice.

In reading through the various chapters, I was impressed with the author's willingness to examine a wide range of technologies, rather than simply subsuming technology into the much more narrow category of computers. Thus, while a full range of articles on computers are included, such as Emily Weiner's "Reflections of an Online Graduate" (263-70) and Sherry Turkle's "Seeing Through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation," (327-37) so are Margery W. Davies' "Women Clerical Workers and the Typewriter: The Writing Machine" (362-74), and Gale Lawrence's anti-technological "Pencils" (120-21). Such essays, those which argue against the excessive use of technology, and which comprise a healthy chunk of Yagelski's text, may help students to think critically about technologies that have become absolutely invisible to them. (I discovered technological invisibility when my power went out. I seemed to have a magical and unshakable belief that pressing switches and turning knobs would somehow bring light back to darkness. It wasn't until my building lost its electricity that I thought about the act of turning lights on at all. Or that living on the eighteenth floor of an elevator building, as I did when I lived in Chicago, would mean that were no lights, computers, refrigeration, heat, cooking, or water without electricity.)

In the same way, Yagelski does a service to our community when he discusses literacy as a concern whether or not the text under consideration is disseminated via print or pixels. That is to say, for Yagelski, print and electronic texts alike are created by writers exercising a literacy that is "a gravely serious political matter . . . . [such a] literacy can be a means of controlling our social and economic lives" (436-37). We work in an academic system that often privileges print over pixel or screen, and in which scholarship that is disseminated electronically may not count, or at least may prove difficult to judge. It is for these reasons that the MLA has called for a widening understand of our careers, and therefore of our teaching: "[a]cademic work in digital media should be evaluated in the light of . . . rapidly changing institutional and professional contexts, and departments should recognize that some traditional notions of scholarship, teaching, and service are being redefined" (MLA Committee on Computers and Emerging Technologies).

In such a world, it may be a rhetorically effective act to treat print and digital materials as if they were one, though, of course, there are worlds of difference between how a book, say, and an extended website act and are used by readers. The conflating of print and electronic media acts in such a text, one directed at students, serves as a fait accompli in which Yagelski, operating from his position as teacher and textbook author, speaks with a kind of performative power: writing technologies of all types are products of literacy, he seems to be saying, and students must learn to deal with the act of writing whether online or otherwise. As he puts it, this time from the introduction to his text, "literacy [is] something more than the basic skills of writing and reading words on a page or a screen" (2).

This is not to say Yagelski is unaware of the differences between print and electronic writing: he sees electronic writing as full of possibilities, and notes that "[an electronic] text is never permanent in the way a printed book or magazine makes a text permanent." While I disagree with his next assertion that electronic texts can always be rearranged in ways that print texts cannot, a distinction which depends entirely on the technology used to disseminate the text (3), the fact remains that there are, for Yagelski, functional differences in the way various texts operate. Nonetheless (and this is my main point), Yagelski is advocating a larger category he calls "reflexive literacy" in which students can "effectively negotiate the writing and reading tasks that [they face as students] and as [people] in a technological and ever changing world" (5). It is this unitary perspective which is so potentially useful to readers of Yagelski's text: it addresses the question of why students need to write in both print and electronic forms. It is because they will, increasingly, be required to do so, in most circumstances. At the very least, writing of short prints texts such as the memo; Web reading and searching; and creation of effective e-mail will be necessary for most students in most occupations.

In the light of this unitary perspective, the various exercises are quite pedagogically useful. For each reading, Yagelski provides questions intended for use before reading the associated text. For instance, one prompt asks students to "pay attention to how [Jay David] Bolter describes 'electronic writing.' . . . Do his descriptions of the nature of electronic writing correspond to your own experiences as a writer?" (136). For experienced readers, this may seem overkill, a question that need not be asked. My experience as a teacher of first year students, however, shows that early impressions of assigned readings are overwhelming, especially to under prepared students. Rapidly, they decide a given essay is "about X," or "means X," and will defend that first impression to the death. In this context, such prereading questions can be quite pedagogically sound, as they help gently to focus students on the text under consideration.

Yagelski then follows each essay with questions and activities for additional learning which are divided into three categories: "Reflecting on the Reading," Examining Rhetorical Strategies" and "Engaging the Issues." While these types of prompts are not at all uncommon to rhetorics, the questions in Yagelski's are often quite thoughtful:

Another question asks students to consider Bolter's work for an audience that doesn't have access to writing technologies. In both cases, these questions raise interesting and thoughtful ways of thinking about technology for students who might only think of these programs as "software," in a relatively non-critical way.

Generally, I find Yagelski's text sound in its emphasis on writing as a technology and a rhetoric simultaneously. It emphasizes that students must not only learn how the software does what it does, but also consider a much larger issue: why do we write what we write? It is the emphasis on a unified reflexive literacy (one that is, of course, present in other rhetorics, though perhaps not always as strongly as in the present work) that is so attractive to me as a teacher.

I wish more of Yagelski's prompts could have suggested electronic texts as their outcome as in "[r]ewrite the essay you wrote for Question #1 as a Web site," with suggestions that the students use the media capabilities of the Web and include "appropriate" links (191); while this is an excellent exercise, however, the fact that Yagelski's text is a reader means that no instructions are given for this exercise. Such a lack, one inherent to a reader by its nature, could be a matter of great concern and difficulty to a teacher not entirely sure how to build or post websites.

Still, even without such instructions, Literacies and Technologies would be of use even in a non-computer-networked classroom. It raises interesting issues. And it's a strong contender with the number of technoreaders now in print.
 

Works Cited

Forman, Janis. "Literacy, Collaboration, and Technology: New Connections and Challenges." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Eds. Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligloss. NY: MLA, 1994. 130-43.

MLA Committee on Computers and Emerging Technologies. "Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages." 21 Nov. 2000. http://www.mla.org/www_mla_org/reports/ (4 Feb. 2001).