The Web, Literacy, and Identity: A Review of Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web

Overview
Though some scholarship discusses the internationalism in the World Wide Web (cf. Cronin) and though some scholarship has analyzed the Web as a cultural and social phenomenon (cf. Herman & Swiss, Mackay & Sullivan), Hawisher and Selfe’s text studies the Web through a new lens; it explores just how international the Web is through research on the “culturally specific literacy practices online” of peoples from around the world (2). As Hawisher and Selfe attest:

Little or no work has been done to trace the ways in which specific, culturally-determined literacy practices serve to constitute the Web as a communication medium. Nor has there been significant and systematic study of the cultural identities individuals create through their literacy practices on the Web. (2)
Though this text does rely heavily on prior scholarship of related fields, especially Brian Street’s Social Literacies, it presents a fundamentally new approach to assessing literacy and the Web.
          To present an international understanding of web-literacy practices, Hawisher and Selfe have supported and edited ten teams of researchers: on each team was at least one person who lived in or was from the country and culture that the team studied. These countries – Hungary, Greece, Australia, Palau, Norway, Japan, Scotland, Mexico, Cuba, and South Africa – represent a broad range of ethnic, historic, social, linguistic, economic, and  geographic contexts for these studies. The resulting research does not claim to present universal characteristics of a country’s people, cultures, or literacies; instead the chapters discuss limited examples of the online literacy practices used by a small subgroup. Each chapter is carefully and clearly organized, with the authors almost always directly stating their organization and purpose (see the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies review). Yet the styles, arrangements, and research methods range from formally written analyses of quantitative and historic data to more informally written ethnographies of small groups or of the authors’ own literacy practices. The result is a clearly organized, thematically coherent set of chapters that develop their insights and evidence through a multi-voiced text.
          By closely examining of the actual, online literacy practices of a range of international peoples, these chapters expose the Western assumptions about the Web, particularly the global village narrative that constructs the Web as always culturally neutral, always beneficial, and as always readily approachable by all, or at least by most, people. As this text dismantles Western assumptions about the Web, it uncovers online literacy practices that result in the postmodern identities on the Web. These chapters' explorations of the global village myth, identity, and literacy are framed and developed by Hawisher and Selfe's introduction and conclusion.
          These chapters only begin the process of researching, analyzing, and evaluating the complex relationships among the Web, online literacy practices, and international cultures. By recognizing the Web as an interested, westernized, linguistically biased communication medium, this text shows the potential for the Web both to repeat the power dynamics of race, class, and gender that already exist outside of the Web and to repeat the conquering of or colonization of one country’s culture by another country, if by a new and different means. Yet, as counterpoints to the Web's potential insidiousness, these chapters demonstrate the Web’s potential to generate support for disadvantaged peoples and groups, and they demonstrate how the Web connects communities of interest or of ethnicity that are separated by oceans and continents.  This text’s research, though, only opens up this field for exploration. To replace the global village narrative and its assumptions about online communities anidentitieses with thoughtful assessments and critical evaluations of real people's literacy practices on the Web, more research needs to be conducted.

A note on the rest of this review
This review is separated into two distinct areas: a small set of critical evaluations of the overall text and a set of informative summaries.  In the critical evaluations, I explore my questions and concerns in response to this text; in the informative summaries, I attempt to represent the chapters, relying heavily on their own words in order to present their distinct styles and voices. I hope that by presenting the texts this way, I enable readers to locate more readily the kinds of information that they are interested in.

Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited