Critical
Responses | Informative
Summaries | Works Cited
"Norwegian Accords: Shaping Peace, Education, and
Gender on the Web"
by Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes
As with many of the chapters in this text, Holmevik and Haynes directly state their purpose and topic:
Our chapter sets forth a dual purpose and a tri-part focus. First, it is concerned with the intricate and interwoven network of literacies that shape Norwegian culture and the cultural and ideological distinctions that shape literacies in Norway. [. . .] Second, it aims to bring these literacies to bear on other Web literacies and the forces that shape them. [. . .] Each goal focuses specifically on the political, educational, and gendered contexts that mark Norwegian Web literacies. Our challenge is to situate Norway within the international communication environment that makes the Web an exciting new space in which multicultural literacies thrive and flow – where literacy meets the sea of culture. (116)Holmevik and Haynes find that “language [. . .] informs everything Norwegian, form the primitive runic inscriptions preserved over hundreds of years, to the pride in dialect” (121). And as such, a study of the literacy practices in Norway is also a study of Norway’s culture, so Holmevik and Haynes' chapter focuses on the culture itself more than on delineating specific individuals' online literacy practices. Norway is simultaneously a “folk museum” and a “laboratory of the future” (131), from its politics that promote peace (122) and its long history of rural culture and multiple local differences (116), to its education system (123) and women’s prominence in the culture and government (125). So Norwegian literacy practices are both locally grounded and internationally astute. To present this connection between Norwegian history and culture and Norwegian online literacy, Holmevik and Haynes use photographs, posters, and quotes from web sites to present Norwegian literacies and their contexts: “We describe the Norwegian traditions that inscribe the people of Norway as deeply as Viking runes carved in stone, writing that digs its petro/graphical and petroglyphic images into the technological literacies of Norway at the turn of the millennium” (115). Holmevik and Haynes' use of narrative as well as analysis, their incorporation of metaphor and simile as well as scholarly diction, and their inclusion of intriguing, and often beautiful, pictures made for a stylistically charming as well as interesting chapter.