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Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited

"Web Literacies of the Already Accessed and Technically Inclined: Schooling in Monterrey, Mexico"
  by Susan Romano, Barbara Field, and Elizabeth W. de Huergo

Through extensive surveys of students’ and their families' literacy practices on the Web, Romano, Field, and de Huergo “initiate inquiry into the new literacy practices of the already accessed, already globally identified, already economically successful, and already technically inclined” (193). Yet a study of the online literacy practices of "middle school students belonging to a highly successful economic group" may, according to the authors, "strike some as suspect” (192). So Romano, Field and de Huergo justify their study:

Literacy researchers, after all, typically study cultures whose literacies are considered inadequate for effective social participation or at best under development. [. . .] Yet if we consider that literacy ethnographers target for scholarly inquiry those sites where changes in literacy practices are afoot, then the American Institute of Monterrey is a choice site, for literacy education at AIM is both undergoing and causing significant change. [. . .] The study of literacy and social change should not be confined, we argue, to worst-case scenarios of inadequate schooling in dysfunctional social sectors. [. . .] Under this assertion, we argue for the importance of examining the Internet literacy practices of the privileged as well as the disenfranchised. (192-193)

Romano, Field, and de Huergo found that the students' contradictions in their survey responses “provided the richest fields for our speculative analyses” (211). The authors were most interested in the epistemological significance of these contradictions:

By their answers to questions about anonymity and to questions about what’s missing on given websites, AIM students position themselves in a field polarized by desires to know and the urges to remain unknown, a field where fear pulls at pleasure and dissimulation at revelation. Even as they demand more knowledge about people, they honor the impulse to remain themselves fictitious – “unreal” in online environments, unknowable. In demanding both truth and fiction in representation, they begin to get at the complexities linking literacy to knowledge in a global arena composed of a fluctuating population of strangers. (211)

In their insistence upon knowing other people and their simultaneous insistence on their own anonymity while surfing the Web, these students’ literacy practices explore the boundaries of epistemology, of knowledge and certitude, as those boundaries directly impinge on their representations of their identities online.