Critical
Responses | Informative
Summaries | Works Cited
"Introduction: Testing the Claims"
by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe
Like most introductions, Hawisher and Selfe begin this text by delineating
their theoretical assumptions and by discussing the sections and each chapter’s
contribution to its section.
Hawisher and Selfe recognize that without a comprehensive study of
literacy practices on the Web they can not expect to fully define the characteristics
of online literacy practices, but they do hope to disprove the assumption
that the Web is culturally neutral:
Importantly, until culturally specific investigations and examinations of culturally determined literacy practices on the Web are undertaken, we are not closer to understanding the truth – or the real complexity – of the internationalness of the literacy environment offered by the Web, or to identifying the many small inaccuracies so effectively masked by the global-village narrative. This book, then, begins the examination of such culturally specific literacy practices – authoring, designing, reading, analyzing, interpreting – on the Web, especially as these practices are shaped, both directly and indirectly, by concrete contexts for language and language use. The overarching goal of the volume is to test the commonly accepted premise that the Web provides individuals around the globe with a common and neutral literacy environment within which international communications are authored, read, and exchanged. (3)So the text is designed to challenge a westernized perception of the Web as a disinterested, available communication medium and to present the groundwork for perceiving the Web as an international, contested, and often resistant arena. Though the Web is recognized as potentially another colonizing force, Hawisher and Selfe's perspective is predominantly positive.
What we offer with this collection is a vision of the Web as a complicated and contested site for postmodern literacy practices. [. . .] The Web also provides a site for transgressive literacy practices that express and value difference; that cling to historical, cultural, and racial diversity; and that help groups and individuals constitute their own multiple identities through language. (15)