JAC Volume 20 Issue 4

Two questions that I find myself asking whenever I pick up a book about computers and writing are "When was the book written?" and "How well will it stand the test of time?" In the world of traditional academic book publishing where it can take two or three years from prospectus to publication, any book about computers and writing can seem doomed to obsolescence from the start. Consider the fact that books that are widely cited as canonical texts in the field—such as Jay David Bolter's Writing Space—date from the early 1990s when the term hypertext referred to texts produced with the software Story Space and the term Web site was relatively unknown. The utopia of hypertext reading and writing that Bolter envisioned in 1991 arguably has been eclipsed by free Internet service providers, built-in web editors, Napster, E-bay, and Amazon.com. One answer to the problem of the timely dissemination of computers and writing scholarship is to produce more hypertext and fewer books. (Even journal articles can take several years from conception to print.) Although this solution may sound good in theory, the practical reality of institutional constraints—such as a tenure system that privileges traditional publication venues—militates against such a shift.

It is this very gap between digital possibilities and institutional realities that concerns contributors to Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet, a slim but rich collection of essays. As with the introduction of other radically new information technologies—writing, print, radio, and television—digital technology will eventually lead to the reconfiguration of notions of writers, readers, texts, and contexts. But older technologies will remain in use perhaps indefinitely. The question addressed by the contributors to this book is how to define literacy in the transition.

Gregory Ulmer sets the tone for the collection in his "Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy)," an essay in which he introduces the argument that will be echoed by many of the authors who follow him: our society has committed itself to a new communication "apparatus"—a new "social machine organizing language use in a civilization"—that requires a new kind of literacy, or what Ulmer calls "electracy." According to Ulmer, "what is at stake is not only different equipment but also different institutional practices and different subject formations from those we now inhabit." Since the former goals of literacy instruction were tied to a former "apparatus," it is time, says Ulmer, "for experiment and invention." The essays in this collection take up that challenge.

Indeed, when I assigned this collection as the final text in a graduate seminar on cyber-literacy, the first word that students used to describe it was "avant garde." Rereading the book eighteen months later, I find that while it may sound less radical, the essays here continue to provoke readers to rethink what it means to teach and to write. As such, the essays remain current. Technology may change at a fast pace, but institutions of higher education do not. That, too, is one of the themes of this book.

The first four essays ask readers to think about how a new communication apparatus changes our understanding of the nature of literacy. "Literacy After the Revolution," Lester Faigley's 1996 Chair's Address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, will be familiar to many readers and, hence, is a good place to start. When Faigley tells us that the digital revolution (which initially promised to increase access to information and democratize participation in public discourse) has, in fact, exacerbated differences between rich and poor, most readers will readily agree. Stockholders' apparent blind faith in the earnings potential of "dot coms" in many ways mirrors a belief in the computer's potential to revolutionize education. Using survey data indicating that most users of the Internet are young, economically privileged, and white, Faigley concludes: "We as teachers have little control over who gains access to higher education and even less control of access to the Internet. Very simply, the Internet is not the world." And yet, five years later, the Internet is the world that college students inhabit or, at the very least, can expect to enter. Although Faigley does not offer a remedy for the problem of differential access, he also does not turn away from the fact that computers will and should change writing instruction. Indeed, as he predicts, "If we return to our annual convention a decade from now and find that the essay is no longer center stage, it will not mean the end of our discipline. I expect that we will be teaching an increasingly fluid, multimedia literacy."

While many writing programs offer classes in networked classrooms or use e-mail as well as the Internet, syllabwebs, and other technologies to enhance writing instruction, the writing that most of us teach looks relatively the same as it did a decade ago. In "Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in Composition," Johndan Johnson-Eilola proposes a radical shift away from a focus on the production of single-authored linear texts "to a notion of composition that values arrangement and connection/disjunction," a move that would more nearly align us with the social constructionist and postmodern theories that we espouse. Using the Alliance for Computers and Writing Web site and an excerpt from a graduate seminar project that consisted of an arrangement of quotations, Johnson-Eilola attempts to show that the configuration of fragments is an important form of writing, one that may ultimately be more valuable to students living in a hypertextual world.

While Johnson-Eilola argues that our old textual values must be made new, William Covino suggests that what seems to be new is really not so new at all. In "Cyberpunk Literacy; or, Piety in the Sky," Covino shows how William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer can be read, in spite of its technological trappings, as a retelling of the old story of the magic of advanced literacy. In a post-Enlightenment age, words may no longer be considered magical, but in Neuromancer (and many popular depictions of cyberspace) technology becomes a new magic. Certainly, that is one of the false assumptions Faigley warns us against. As Covino notes, cyberspace is valuable primarily as "a vast space for the construction of meaning." Regardless of the technology of literacy that we employ, the old question remains: "why write?"

Don Byrd and Derek Owens offer a provocative answer to this question in "Writing in the Hivemind." Like Johnson-Eilola, Byrd and Owens seek a kind of writing more compatible with social constructionist and postmodern theories of writing. Toward that end, they gathered with several others over the course of a semester to write together using a synchronous communication system, the interchange function of Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment. Writers wrote simultaneously in what Byrd and Owens describe as a "jam session." Since no one writer controlled the text, the final transcript represented what they called a "multilayered polylogue." In fact, Byrd and Owens argue that the product of their writing was valuable precisely because it was not meant to be read; instead, it represented "the construction of group consciousness through art." One might ask whether teachers of college writing ought to be engaging their students in the construction of group consciousness. One might also ask, "Why not?" Byrd and Owens invite us to see writing from a perspective other than that of the classroom teacher, a crucial move in the development of a fully realized theory of digital literacy. The writing classroom is not the world either.

The fact that writing can construct a new consciousness is the primary focus of the second group of essays in Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. The essays in this section critically reevaluate claims that virtual writing allows for the creation of a virtual self that transcends (Covino might say "magically" transcends) the physical body. In "We Are Not Just (Electronic) Words: Learning the Literacies of Culture, Body, and Politics," Beth Kolko provides a useful survey of the most influential theorists studying the virtual subject. Kolko is particularly interested in questions of accountability in cyberspace. If writers believe that their virtual words are detached from their "real" selves, will they feel the same sense of responsibility for the consequences of those words? In order to answer that question, Kolko calls for more extensive study of the speech acts that constitute shifts in subjectivity.

In her playful essay, "prosthetic_rhetorics@writing.loss.technology," Cynthia Haynes uses the metaphor of the prosthesis to explore teachers' discomfort both with their prosthetic relationship to the academy and with computers as prostheses of instruction. Haynes identifies four possible approaches to a prosthetic rhetoric: the "vivogenic," in which computers are seen as tools of empowerment; the "pathogenic," in which computers appear as threats to a unified self; the "cryogenic," in which the values of print culture are frozen; and the "transgenic" (Haynes' choice), in which "composition instruction becomes a process of educating the machine." Such a process requires a fluid relationship between user and machine, one in which hybridization is the norm and one in which new genres, new tropes, and new kinds of identity are made possible. In "Our Bodies? Our Selves?" Raul Sanchez questions the nature of such new identities as they are created by students working in MUDs (Multi-User Domains). Sanchez admits asking his students to participate in MUDs, but he complicates his own and other teachers' motives for doing so. One of the most important conclusions he comes to is that while cyberspace may free writers to create alternate subjectivities, it does not enable them to rewrite the subjectivities created for them by other discourses. For example, MUDs may allow formerly silenced students to speak, but the problem of silencing in face-to-face settings remains.

The final group of essays more directly explore the difficulty of applying these new theories of literacy in contemporary writing class rooms. Of particular value are the essays that consider how computer-supported pedagogies are complicated by factors beyond the computers themselves. In "The Persistence of Authority: Coercing the Student Body," Todd Taylor reflects on his experience designing a new networked writing classroom, acknowledging that—in spite of his commitment to a student-centered pedagogy—the perimeter arrangement that he chose functions, like Foucault's notion of the panopticon, to maintain control over student bodies. Even chairs on wheels, which give students freedom to collaborate, can be a form of coercion if teachers require students to work together. As Taylor discovers, technology itself is incapable of altering the contract to coerce and be coerced that is the business of institutionalized writing instruction.

In another example of teacherly self-reflection, Terry Craig, Leslie Harris, and Richard Smith describe a project that linked three composition classes at different types of institutions: a small private rural college, a rural community college, and a large urban university. Students shared an asynchronous journal space and met regularly in a MOO (MUD-object oriented) to discuss the theme of the course: families across cultures. The authors found that after an initial period of politeness, students' communication began to resemble what Mary Louise Pratt has called a "contact zone," a space in which different cultures collide and students learn to defend their positions or modify them in response to opposing arguments. Although I was initially skeptical of such a utopian claim, the authors also admitted to some trouble in paradise. Specifically, they noted students' tendency to define themselves against a demonized Other, represented by the other schools as well as by instances of resistance in which students began to complain about the class in private e-mail messages to each other. On reflection, these authors realized that their course content may have unintentionally reified a kind of identity politics, thus exacerbating the students' tendency to stereotype the other institutions: private college students were stereotyped as immature; urban university students, as condescending. Once again, computers enable many new things, but they do not magically resolve old problems.

In "Reading the Networks of Power: Rethinking `Critical Thinking' in Computerized Classrooms," Tim Mayers and Kevin Swafford offer another example of critical evaluation of pedagogy—this time by students. As the final assignment in a course that focused on semiotic analyses of popular culture combined with self-reflective explorations of their own language use, students were asked to "read" their experience in a computer-supported classroom. Mayers and Swafford wanted to give students space to investigate "the authority ceded to technology by the economy" and to resist that authority. Unfortunately, the authors do not share student responses to this assignment. As the authors admit, resisting ideology is especially difficult, making it even more crucial that we see successful instances of such resistance.

It is interesting that Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet begins and ends with the problem of differential access. In his opening essay, Faigley cites statistics demonstrating that technology is concentrated in the hands of the privileged. In an essay closing the collection, Patricia Fitzsimmons-Hunter and Charles Moran show how a relatively small grant enabled technology-poor public school teachers to become agents for technological change. Spending only about twenty-five percent of monies on technology (to be shared among program participants) and seventy-five percent on compensation for teachers, the project coordinators supported four teacher development initiatives: thirty K-12 teachers collaboratively developed computer-supported writing process curricula; two cross-disciplinary teams of junior high school teachers used the computers in writing-to-learn activities; teachers initiated independent writing projects with their students; and teachers who had participated in the curriculum workshop developed teacher training materials to share with others in the district. In addition to the direct benefits to teachers and students that these projects provided, there was one other important outcome: teachers began aggressively pursuing ways to permanently acquire access to technology. While talk of the matrix and MOOs is inspiring, reading about teachers who use limited computer resources to advance their students' writing proves to be especially compelling.

Coming back to Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet for a second read eighteen months after the first, I realized that the essays that had stayed with me were those populated by real teachers and real writers struggling to make meaning of technology while using technology to make meaning. We can only hope for more concrete descriptions of writers, texts, classrooms (and other settings) that illustrate the principles of multiplicity, collaboration, dispersal, and chaos that are lauded here as characteristic of the new literacy of the Internet age.