Critical
Responses | Informative
Summaries | Works Cited
"Reading Sideways, Backwards, and Across: Scottish
and American Literacy Practices and Weaving the Web
by Sarah Sloane and Jason Johnstone
As with many of the chapters in this text, Sloane and Johnstone directly state their structure:
The first half of this chapter offers a general description of Scottish literacy practices and events and focuses on Scottish political, economic, educational, and historical contexts of the simple act of reading a newspaper online. The second half of this chapter offers our readings of online newspapers and suggests an interpretation of our own readings. Ultimately, we attempt to connect the two halves our the chapter, speculating how the thick description of Scottish literacy events inflects the authors’ own idiosyncratic, culturally-based negotiations of reading online newspapers. (157-158)Sloane and Johnstone base their discussion of Scottish, online literacy practices on the history of Scottish literary practices. Sloane and Johnstone show how “borrowing has been a central activity in Scottish writing over the last four centuries” and how this borrowing is "becoming one of the signal gestures of late twentieth-century readers reading on the Web” (181). They see this borrowing as similar to the kind of "patch-reading" that is practiced on the Web. “Patch-reading,” as a literacy practice, is “a new activity of hand and eye, splicing together stories and meaning across the Web” (158), and it creates an “import and export of general cultural knowledge” (158). Similarly, the Scottish tradition of borrowing texts and words from other writers derives from “a nervous looking outward beyond the borders of Scotland to determine worth, quality, and form of compositions, critical response, and even Scottish identity” (155). So, through “a perspective both social and semiotic,” Sloane and Johnstone “can see the Web as a mechanism for the transmission and reception of signs, especially cultural signs; and when we study the transmission and reception of cultural signs at a particular social site, the daily newspaper, we see a Scottish tradition of borrowing transmuted into a new medium, and with a new profile. This new borrowing, as it emerges in our personal reading patterns, has been both cross-cultural and nostalgic” (156).
To explore the effects of this Scottish tradition of borrowing as “patch reading” the two authors read newspapers on the Web and evaluated their own literacy practices. They realized that
Sarah’s readings might best be characterized as nostalgic or ‘looking backwards,’ and Jason’s as paratactic, or ‘looking sideways,’ and as more broadly international. [. . . They] do see [their] readings and subsequent analysis as moving towards the development of a critical category in understanding how cultural identity is formed, fractured, and reinforced by reading practices. [They] believe that the way [they] follow national stories in online newspapers published on the Web fits into a Scottish pattern of borrowing ideas, themes, and words written outside its borders, and an American pattern of seeking meaning and authenticity in the traces of self we find in some Web-version of an ancestral homeland. (158)For both authors, the constructions and reconstructions of identity through “patch-reading” on the Web “illuminates the capacities and apparatus that is the Web: The Web not only connects me to you, it mingles bits of my words with bytes of yours, my account with your account” (181). For Sloane and Johnstone, "patch-reading" on the Web mixes literacy practices with identity and demonstrates how literacy practices and identity shape and reshape each other.