by Christopher Dean, Will Hochman, Carra Hood, and Robert McEachern

The Many Colored Coat of the Emperor: Multi-layered, Literate, and Physical: Node VII
By Chris Dean

The Second Frontier of Space
or, In the Beginning Ong Discussed "The Spoken Word"

Section Two

In her introduction to Voice and the Actor, Cicely Berry talks about what a voice means to a person. According to Berry, a person's own voice is contingent on a person's environment, "ear," physical agility, and personality (7-8). The phrase "own voice" is key for Berry because the voice is a personal and social matter; however, there is a personal tie to a particular perception of a person's voice (8). This tie is so strong that "criticism of your voice is very close to criticism of yourself, and can easily be destructive" (8).

From Berry's description of the voice, I take two ideas: (a) the voice is a physical attribute that is socially conditioned, and (b) the perception of our voice is something that we all have a stake in. Berry also reminds us that voices, and all sound, interact with the space that surrounds them so that "the emptier the space and the less porous the walls, the more it will be amplified" (9). For my purpose, this means not only should teachers take into account the social, affective, and physical nature of the voice itself, but the way that the voice interacts with space and other voices.

The final point I want to bring up is that people learn to speak naturally as a result of social interaction--learning the grammar of their language through social interaction. Thus, spoken language is everyone's first language, written language perhaps our second, and electronic discourse at least the third language we acquire. Speech is the language of our and our students' home worlds, and I imagine that there could be a sense of loss if we were to enter fully into a virtual, voiceless, electronic world with our students. The academy, where students are agonistically told to appropriate or be appropriated by academic discourse, is a place of sometimes gut-wrenching loss. I question, then, whether the field of computers and writing needs to exacerbate that loss by taking away the actual voices of students, which includes discursive strategies they have built through experience and learning in non-computerized spaces.

I make this point because there is some enthusiasm in the world of computers and writing for computer-mediated technologies that are solely based in text. In High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs, Haynes and Holmevik include a number of articles that speak rather positively of the textual dominance of MOOs. One of the most intriguing instances of this enthuiasm is in the authors' introduction when they claim that "the simple text itself" makes MOOs "intriguing and powerful" spaces for writing (4). Holmevik and Haynes later add that MOO text is "orality put into writing" (11). These claims are echoed throughout High Wired, and it is these claims that MOOs are "orality put into writing" (which I have heard from many teachers working with MOOs) that I want to focus on for a moment.

I contend that the text of MOOs is not "orality put into writing"; that it is secondary orality with ties as close to written discourse as it is to oral discourse. I say this because MOO- and MUD-speak are orality minus the physically embodied voice. The physically embodied voice, and by extension oral language, are physical creations that need bodies and physical space (not virtual space) to live and thrive in. Even if technology were to improve so that streaming video and audio were readily available to all teachers and students, the need for real-time, oral conversation would not be eliminated. As Cicely Berry reminds us, voices interact with real space and real time; minus this spatial interaction, we are left only with the reproduction of voices (9).

Ultimately, I'm not arguing that MOOs and other electronic discourses have no place in computer-aided peer response work or other multi-layered literate activity; I'm simply saying that they cannot--and should not--be complete replacements for face-to-face oral interaction. I can envision classroom spaces where by design or necessity one form of discourse is more or less dominant, but I think to move into a learning space where the voice and body are not physically available for learning is a great loss.

Students arrive in our class speaking probably at least two languages: a language of home and hearth and the language of the schools. My question for those who might counsel us to work exclusively in MOOs and other arenas of pure electronic discourse is this: How can electronic spaces accommodate the oral language of home? I would argue that this is almost impossible to do because of the overwhelmingly textual nature of most electronic discourse. It seems that if we demand students enter into electronic spaces to do literacy work, then we are attenuating not only the students' repertoire of discursive practices, but we may even be setting them up for a loss of home language. The sort of loss of a linguistic home that Richard Rodriguez speaks so eloquently of throughout The Hunger of Memory. It is a loss that can, as Rodriguez notes, lead towards academic achievement by understanding the nature of "public languages," but that doesn't lessen the sense of loss that Rodriguez and others feel when they lose immediate access to an intimate, home-based language (26).

Also, we need to remember that synchronous work demands that students give up, or learn to compensate for, learning strategies that are tied to bodily-kinesthetic intelligences, as well as the oral half of linguistic intelligences. This strikes me as problematic particularly when I consider that so many of the at-risk students I've worked with seem most comfortable when working in bodily-kinesthetic modalities.

Node Eight of "The Many Colored Coat of the Emperor"