November 15, 2009

A Review of Western Literacy Technologies


To be cyberliterate means that we need to understand the relationship between our communication technologies and ourselves, our communities, and our cultures. It may be hard to see the effects of the Internet and cyberspace on our daily lives, in large part because we are living in the midst of these changes. Already we take so much for granted. Email messages containing photos of your family in another state; real-time chats and instant messages; Web sites for almost every product, service, and idea imaginable—these features have quickly become part of our daily landscape. And even as these technologies shift into different shapes (new versions of software, faster Internet connections), they continue to affect how we view the world. Tyner’s observation is astute: “Some literacy technologies atrophy from widespread disuse, but the conventions they foster in form and content may linger for centuries” (1998, 40). Cutting and pasting, kerning, the standard size of a page (81 / 2 #11 inches)—all these ideas come from an older print technology but have made their way into new technologies like word processing and Web page design.



Many people have become familiar with the standard litany of communication technologies in Western history: most books about the Internet have sections that describe the printing press, telegraph, radio, telephone, television, and so on. Each particular narrative paints a story to the author’s liking, but most suggest in some way or another that these technologies led us to where we are today. The idea that today’s Internet is a direct descendent of Gutenberg was canonized when the Arts and Entertainment cable channel, in October 1999, named the thirteenth-century inventor and craftsman the “#1 person in the millennium” (after a long countdown of the “top 100”). Yet what is often missing from these popularized accounts is a look at the relationship between communication technologies, cultures, and worldviews. Many scholars (Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Arnold Pacey—to name just a few) have observed these relationships between our tools and our times. Inorder to gain perspective on cyberliteracy, it is useful to revisit the history of communication technologies and look at how these technologies have altered cultures.

In the Western story of literacy and technology, we often begin by looking at the stone counting devices used by ancient peoples to keep track of commerce, such as the sale of domesticated animals or grain (Faigley 1999). These technologies created what David Kaufer and Kathleen Carley (1993) call a “technological situation . . . a set of available [communication] technologies and their distribution across individuals in the society” (99). Along with word of mouth and memory, farmers and tradespeople could rely on these in scribed pieces of clay to remind them who owed them a sheep or some wheat or barley. This technology increased the “reach” of communication, because individuals did not need to be near each other to have a record of their transaction. A similar discussion takes place around the papyrus scroll; Aristotle’s manuscripts were the length that they were in part because they needed to fit the size of a standard scroll (Aristotle 1991, 13). Social conditions changed, as Plato’s oft-quoted Phaedrus dialogue tells us, when people began to record oral discourse onto these paper scrolls. And when the Catholic Church controlled manuscripts, another set of social conditions emerged: knowledge was in the hands of the
priests and monks who maintained and copied these documents. As movable type and the Gutenberg printing press caught on, everyday people could own a Bible or a novel. Books and pamphlets, and issues of who could print and own them, became the subjects of many political battles, but in the end, the book—particularly the paperback—became what some would call a profound communication technology.

It is small and lightweight. It does not require batteries. You can read it and pass it along to someone else. Indeed, from stone etchings to paperback novels, the shapes we have given the technologies of reading and writing have in turn become the shapes of how we live with each other. Next in this narrative come electronic technologies, which speeded up the transmission of information, increased the number of people who received this information (see Chapter 2), and began to move information from tangible ink on the page to electrified characters and sounds sent over wires. The impact of the telegraph and train, telephone, radio, and television has been studied widely by media critics, social historians, and historians and critics of technology. In fact, the telegraph brought with it changes very similar to those we see with the Internet: Tom Standage, in The Victorian Internet (1998), calls the telegraph the “mother of all networks” and describes how this technology hinted at what we now find so profound about Internet communication: speed, reach, online romance, news and media coverage, and “a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary”.

Every communication technology, based on the choices made when it was designed and developed, changed our senses of space, community, and self. Each technology changed our sense of what we expect from our friends and our political leaders: until recently, for example, politicians needed to travel by plane or train to make personal connections with their constituencies. Later it was possible to use radio and television, but citizens were not able to talk back to these one-way technologies. Today politicians can stay in touch via the Web, and citizens fully expect to be able to do so; Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, for example, has maintained a successful Web site both before and after his election.

People born in the midst of a new technology, before it becomes ubiquitous, are often keenly aware of these social and cultural changes (never more so than today, when commentary about the Internet is everywhere). Many of us who are now over 40 learned to write first with paper and pencil, then with a typewriter. We adapted our writing styles and techniques as each iteration of word processor came along, from the dedicated machines of the 1980s (like the Wang) to the more intuitive software of Word Perfect and Microsoft Word. Despite great strides in user interfaces, screen resolutions, and processing speeds, many people—particularly in my age group—have trouble editing on screen. At a certain stage, we need to print out our memo, essay, or letter because of what researcher Christina Haas (1996) has characterized as the “text sense problem.” The people she studied indicated that when they used the computer to write, they had “a hard time knowing where [they were] ” and often felt disconnected and lost in the screen text.

Many of us who teach writing have noticed that a younger generation, surrounded by screens and buttons, are comfortable with writing, editing, and navigating completely within the digital text. They live in a world of digitized space. Before they could even speak, they watched people channel surf, press buttons to heat things in a microwave, and navigate the Web. This generation does not always create a document with the goal of printing it (a feature of early word processing); what they produce on the screen often is the final product (a Web page, for example). Our technologies condition our comfort, and the more ubiquitous a technology is, the more natural it seems.

Discussions of electronic technologies often focus on how we read and write in this space. Perhaps because writing instructors were some of the first to be confronted with computers in the class- room, a wide body of commentary and research has developed to consider this particular feature of e-technologies: how we work with text affects how we read and write. Linear ways of thinking go by the wayside the more one begins to be surrounded by chunks of information, sound bites, and “site bites” (Welch 1999).

Yet the relationship between our communication technologies and our lives is not only a cognitive one. It is a political one as well. New technologies are often used to reinforce, not change, current power structures. On the Internet, this phenomenon is readily apparent. Take Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village.” Paul Levinson (1999) notes the aptness of this concept, originally
conceived with television in mind, for today’s Internet: “The advent of computer screens not only as receivers but initiators of information in homes and offices around the world . . . [fulfills] another of McLuhan’s observations about the global village—namely, that its dispersion of information is creating a new power structure whose ‘centers are everywhere and margins are nowhere’”. But even
though the Internet inspires new global models, many of the best grassroots sites are being bought out and sold on the traditional stock market. They now have ceos, worry about profit margins, and are subject to large mergers (like aol and Time Warner).

Another example is copyright, which should be opening up in light of the ability to share via the Internet. Instead, copyright is getting even more restrictive: U.S. legislation passed in 1998 (the so called Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act) was favored by powerful publishing and entertainment lobbies and extended the term of copyright by another 20 years. Most proposed legislation continues to favor copyright holders and not the public.

Cyberliteracy, then, takes into account many features. For years, educators have talked about a critical literacy in the context of students using printed books. Cyberliteracy electrifies the discussion, inviting us now, while the technology is growing all around us, to consider what is different about Internet communication. Cyberliteracy recognizes that on the Internet, communication is a blend of oral, written, and visual information: the technology, like many before it, shapes our social spaces, replacing the slower methods of handwriting and typing with the speed and frenzy of digitized text. The Internet has broad reach like television, but it is interactive like a conversation. While inviting a “global village,” the technology is embedded in a political and economic context of corporate mergers and government regulations.

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