JAC Volume 20 Issue 4

I've been working with computers in the writing classroom for almost two decades, beginning in the early 1980s when we first opened a computer lab at my university in connection with the writing center. What has always fascinated me the most about using computers to teach writing are the ways in which the human-computer interface influences our pedagogies. The title of this most recent Hawisher and Selfe collection immediately grabbed my attention, as did the cover photograph of a distinctly futuristic woman's profile, but one that was obviously sculpted rather than computer generated. What would this collection have to say about human passions, teaching practices, and their relationship to computer tech nologies of the new century? What does this book have to do with my students and my teaching at a research university in the West? Even more specifically, why should I care? In their introductory essay, Hawisher and Selfe seek to explain their reasons for the "passion" in this collection: "When we as editors were asked which essay prompted us to lead off the title of this book with `passions,' we had no ready answer. Many of the essays in this collection speak passionately about what should matter today—about the ethical dimensions of everyday teaching and living. . . ." The collection does not disappoint. In fact, I have found myself returning to it time and again as I seek to understand what is happening in my own classroom.

In a recent online discussion forum in my class, a student posted the following comment on a chapter from Victor Vitanza's CyberReader:

Other students in the class responded with a variety of comments about their own abilities (or lack thereof) in multi-tasking and their concerns about changing literacy practices. How do we get children of technology to sit still long enough to read a book, for example? Is the attention span of today's students shorter, and is this change contributing to an inability to analyze, critique, and synthesize?

The first section of Hawisher and Selfe's collection, "Refiguring Notions of Literacy in an Electronic World," seeks to help us come to grips with these very questions. The essays in this section are wide-ranging and provocative. They don't spout platitudes or propose pat solutions; instead they speculate broadly on the changes with which we are all grappling. As Dennis Baron puts it in the opening chapter, "How the computer will eventually alter literacy practices remains to be seen. . . . Although the rate of change of computer development is significantly faster [than print], it is still too early to do significant speculating."

Other chapters in this section, however, make insightful observations about those factors that are pushing the changes in our notions of literacy. In "Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy," Doug Hesse argues passionately that the essay, an important genre in liberal education, not be lost in the feverish dash toward Internet writing: "It is that narrativizing of experience, information and ideas—the imposition and making plausible of a certain sequence of textual moves—that characterizes the essay." Internet writing, by contrast "connects through juxtaposition, not commentary." Myka Vielstimmig (the pen name for the collaborative authors Michael Spooner and Kathleen Blake Yancey) pushes this notion further by arguing, and illustrating visually on the page, "another kind of essay: a text that accommodates narrative and exposition and pattern, all three." Sarah Sloane introduces new terminology that may help us describe the literacy experiences of individuals: "I propose the critical terms of apparitional knowledge, medial hauntings, and genealogy as a way into understanding how a writer's past writing experiences inform his present choices in constructing the scene of his writing."

In "English at the Crossroads," Gunther Kress offers a brilliant articulation of the changes in the communication landscape brought about by the shift from the verbal to the visual: "On the one hand, I suggest that the visual is becoming prominent in the landscape of public communication, and that this cannot be ignored by school-curricula. On the other hand, I suggest that our present theories of language and meaning are simply inadequate and inappropriate for the task which English will need to perform." In this shift from the verbal to the visual, Kress argues, the visual is "taking over many of the functions of written language." Following up on the potential loss of the essay as we know it and as it is lamented in Hesse's chapter, Kress suggests, "Contemporary semiotic processes . . . seem to signal a shift from text as a cohesively and coherently organized representation of the world to be read, to the notion of unorganized semiotic resources to be used. This parallels and reinforces the move away from narrative." This powerful idea helped me to better understand the kinds of literacy practices I've been struggling to teach my own students. They move much more quickly to the use of the visual than I'm comfortable with. I constantly have to ask them to pause, to work on writing, to work on the "verbal" in their hypertexts before turning so quickly to, or relying so heavily on, the visual. They seem to understand more easily and readily than I (or those of my generation) this shift in the central meaning-making ability of hypertext.

In an excellent maneuver, the editors of this collection have included "response" essays to close each major section. The response essay to the first section, written by Diana George and Diane Shoos, pulls together the seemingly disparate threads of these chapters. They remind us that the changing nature of texts and the impact of media necessarily cause us to redefine critical literacy: "Defining critical literacy as a process of reading in which readers themselves are central to meaning-making leads to the question of whether that role and process shift with different kinds of texts." Furthermore, although texts constructed in the newer media necessitate different demands on readers to construct meaning, George and Shoos caution us that critical literacy "must call equal attention to the production as well as the reception of texts." In other words, yes, readers do take more responsibility for constructing meaning, but this does not let writers entirely off the hook. Indeed, George and Shoos state: "What we are concerned about is the potential for abandoning the responsibility writers, filmmakers, and other cultural producers must take for the ideas they put before us. Representation is never innocent. It has real effects and repercussions."

The second section of this collection, "Revisiting Notions of Teaching and Access in an Electronic Age," moves our locus of concern from literacy practices in general to the specifics of our teaching practices and the realities of our teaching contexts. As Bertram Bruce notes in his response essay, all of the chapters in this section challenge our comfort zone. Some of the cautionary notes that are sounded include Lester Faigley's observation that "technology has brought corporate involvement in education to an extent never seen before." Nevertheless, Faigley also outlines the very real pedagogical advantages that can come from a stimulating technological learning environment in which teachers and students engage productively with new media. In "Postmodern Pedagogy in Electronic Conversations," Marilyn Cooper describes how the changing conversations about electronic discourse parallel changes involved in the shift from modernism to postmodernism.

In "Hyper-reading and their Reading Engines," James Sosnoski discusses changes in reading behaviors that are the result of reading online texts, identifying eight characteristics that are found in "hyper-reading": filtering, skimming, pecking, imposing, filming, trespassing, de-authorizing, and fragmenting. As I read the descriptions of these characteristics, I found myself nodding knowingly and identifying with practices that both my students and I repeatedly perform. In his discussion of "imposing," for example, Sosnoski takes on the debate about "whether the reader or the text played the greater role in determining meaning." In what I think is a significant compromise between the two poles, he concludes: "I would argue that readers do not create the meaning of electronic texts any more than they create the meaning of printed texts but that they do make them significant." He points out that the eight traits he outlines provide specific advantages for readers. I intend to bring these traits to the attention of my students for a discussion about their own changing reading habits. Sosnoski's balanced analysis takes the hype out of hyper-reading: "I believe that a more sensible view sees hyper-reading, whether exploratory or constructive, as another way of reading (and writing) which is not likely to supplant the ones we already have since they accomplish different objectives."

Geoffrey Sirc leads us through an intriguing analysis of postmodernist art and composition. He comes to the conclusion that "composition after Duchamp is idea-generative, not product-oriented." In "Access: The `A' Word in Technology Studies," Charles Moran offers a cautionary note about changing demographics and the "haves and have nots among us and among our students." His is a blunt reality check: the gap between the rich and poor, in this country and in the world, is widening; and "the over-riding factor in determining who gets access [to technology] and who does not is wealth." Moran argues convincingly that we as a profession need to "bring this topic forward on our agenda and give it more attention than we have in the past." Bruce's response to the chapters in the second section of the collection affirms their importance and challenges us to pay attention to the ways in which they shift our focus from the technological to the ethical. Teachers, says Bruce, must also pay attention to the contexts in which their students learn. It is all too easy to get sidetracked by the compelling technical issues at the expense of critical awareness: "Techniques are important, but beyond any set of techniques, teachers need to develop critical awareness. . . . [and] think primarily about learning and secondarily about the technologies that support it." I would extend this point and say that students, as well as teachers, should also be developing a similar critical awareness; a large portion of my composition classes is now spent interrogating the very media with which we are all grappling.

The third section in this book, "Ethical and Feminist Concerns in an Electronic World," extends the discussion in section two by bringing feminist critique to bear on the issues and problems raised by previous critiques. James Porter shows how strongly we are influenced by the cultural framework of liberal individualism. He proposes a viable alternative, based on African communitarian theory or liberation theology, which he terms the communitarian alternative. In this thoughtful essay, Porter argues persuasively that we need to critique our ethical frameworks in the service of discovering what assumptions and presuppositions govern online policy decisions. Susan Romano offers an instructive look at how women construct themselves, and how they are constructed, in online environments. She analyzes online conference transcripts to illustrate ways in which women define "the relationship of self to language in online environments." Gail Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan interrogate the impact of visual imagery for women on the Internet. The central question of their essay is "what happens to women's online lives when the visual comes into play?" They use screen shots of women who have represented themselves on the Internet as well as commercial shots of representations intended to sell products. Their conclusion is sobering: "In its profusion of visual images, the World Wide Web is doing little more than imitating the material world we all inhabit." Cynthia Selfe extends the discussion of representation to include cultural representations that illustrate pervasive cultural myths. Selfe includes photos of advertisements that clearly show her point that cultural symbols (such as the "global village" or the "land of opportunity") are used to perpetuate our own cultural myopia. She concludes that this "realization can serve to remind teachers that technology does not necessarily bring with it social progress." Carolyn Guyer and Diane Hagaman illustrate ways in which images (in this case, photographs of various spaces) can tell a powerful story, and in her response to this third group of essays, Cynthia Haynes further complicates what Hawisher and Sullivan call the "vexed relationship between online writing and images." Haynes' conclusion is that "educational technologies that utilize Internet-based programs are disturbing the logos of the `academy' and sending shockwaves through academia."

In a logical progression from the broader issues of literacy, textuality, ethics, and gender, the fourth and final section of this wonderful collection focuses on constructing the self. Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola question our rather glib use of the term "literacy" and conclude: "None of these terms exhausts new possibilities for `literacy,' but only suggests productive ways of questioning our current positions, of unpacking old bundles and remaking new ones. Unpack ours and make your own." Joe Amato writes a very self-revelatory narrative to illustrate concretely how much our own cultural backgrounds and experiences affect our current reactions to and against technology. In another beautiful narrative, Janet Carey Eldred writes of the changing voice of her mother, a voice that includes not only verbal and handwritten texts, but also e-mails and machine-generated conversations mediated by a third party. I must confess that the family images in this chapter immediately drew me in; I read this chapter first before anything else in the text—another testimony to the power of images.

Michael Joyce speculates on how we change in an electronic world, and yet how we somehow stay the same: "What comes next? Will the Web supplant or supplement the world or book? . . . Linear and hypertextual narratives seem a polarity but are only opposite shores of a stream." Joyce's stream metaphor helped me to visualize the connection between the two, but also to see their differences. In a response to the final group of essays, Stuart Moulthrop brings these narratives into some kind of relationship with each other. He notes that, although these stories have primarily looked to the past to help understand the present and future, at the same time they "do not completely overlook contemporary questions and controversies." He takes to heart Joyce's advice that we will have to watch, but he also says that watching in itself may not be enough. He concludes: "Though it is important to sight back along both shores of the stream, we cannot overlook the ground on which we are standing."