Part IV: "Searching for Notions of Our Postmodern Literate
Selves in an Electronic World"
| "Literacy might be redefined as the ability to make connections--to our technologies, among our technologies, and among other human beings. This redefinition of literacy is dynamic, contextualized." (Shannon Carter) |
Part IV of this collection presses forward with the questions that have dominated this collection. Accordingly, the essays in Part IV reveal, quite passionately at times, the belief that literacy is not, nor can it be, neutral.
The very notion of teaching the basic skills of literacy--whether that be print literacy, digital literacy, or computer literacy--presumes that our version (the version the teacher of literacy holds) of the relationship between ourselves and print and ourselves and computers (or any other technology we may purport to teach literacy in) is the right relationship. By teaching a particular literacy without a sensitivity to the cultural dynamics that link humans with their technologies, we are discouraging difference and perpetuating the Myth of Literacy that has kept so many Americans locked in the margins, denied access to the privileges afforded the more mainstream portions of our society.
Joe Amato and Janet Carey Eldred tell of literacy through their parents: Amato through his father's inability to fill out his welfare forms (though his reading and writing skills were quite strong) and Eldred through her mother's "journaling" and the e-mails they exchanged as her mother grew ill and her speech became labored. Both read "literacy" as the ability to make connections, in this case Amato's and Eldred's ability to make connections with their parents and their parents' abilities to make connections with the world.
Michael Joyce tells of literacy through connections as well, but for him these connections, these literacies, are a part of who we are as human beings; these connections are always already integrated in our ways of becoming, in our perpetual state of "nextness"--the fundamental way in which we construct our realities. "We are who we are." Like Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, like Amato and Eldred, Joyce is troubled by our ability to passively be read by our culture rather than to actually read that culture.
The varying genres included in this section (the traditional academic prose--at least somewhat traditional--of Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola's piece, the straight (somewhat) autobiographical narratives of Amato's and Eldred's contributions, the philosophical--almost classically philosophical--musings of the chapter by Joyce, and the evaluative mode plus story of Moulthrop) are certainly a testament to the ways in which our twentieth-century technologies have altered our present, our future, and our sense of self. But they are also a testament to the fact that these new technologies have forever affected our past, our traditions. Even the "academic" discourse of the stodgy English studies folk has changed. Don't use "I"? I haven't read a single essay in this collection that subscribes to that rule. Every contributor in this volume understands that the "I" and the "us" cannot be separated from our literacies and the artifacts these literacies produce. "I" and "us" are an integral part of the writing technology itself.
- Anne Frances Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola: "Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?"
- Joe Amato: "Family Values: Literacy, Technology, and Uncle Sam"
- Janet Carey Eldred: "Technology's Strange, Familiar Voices"
- Michael Joyce: "Beyond Next Before You Once Again: Repossessing and Renewing Electronic Culture"
- Stuart Moulthrop: "Response: Everybody's Elegies"
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