Taking advantage of tools and bewaring of false promises

In “Blinded by the Letter Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else!” Anne Frances Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola address two myths that are associated with discussions of “literacy,” one, that literacy is always a tool of liberation for oppressed peoples, and two, that literacy will improve an individual’s sense of self and moral character. I have often had a bad taste in my mouth when reading academic discussions of literacy in the sense that academic efforts to offer literacy to oppressed peoples are like wealthy philanthropy—rich people donate money because it makes them feel good, but more often than not, not because it will really create substantial change. I’m not saying that efforts to share literacies are not worthwhile and effective, but I don’t think teaching someone to read and write is the panacea that will dissolve class inequity. Literacy is just a piece of the puzzle. The Wysocki and Johnson-Eiolola article was refreshing to me. This quote from Ruth Finnegan words it well, “So, when people might want, for example, houses or jobs or economic reform, they arc instead given literacy programs. (41)” 

The second myth taken up by Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola is that the book, and the book alone, offers people the necessary self-reflection to become more self realized and moral individuals. A book or literacy for that matter does not by default make you a moral person. I hear this in the tone of people’s voices when they react to discovering that another individual has never read a book or only plays video games. Yes, reading does open you up to considering moral ideas, but it does not inherently make you moral. The cultural expectation to read can be oppressive. This Portlandia sketch sums up this myth pretty well to me.

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola continue their argument by applying their discussion of literacy myths to computers, urging readers to consider the use of the term “literacy” when applying it to computers—for fear that we might apply the same assumptions and myths to computer literacy. Efforts by the Clinton administration to put a computer in every classroom seem to be tangential to this idea of applying the same myths of literacy to computers. Computers in every classroom did not save students, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt them either.  

The second assumed promise of literacy that the authors warn us to consider carefully is this idea of improving the self, the bildungsroman of literacy. A bildungsroman is a literary term for a coming of age story. Computers are very much tied to self-improvement and authoritative self-identity. We can see these myths embodied in rags to riches stories like that of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, all wunderkinds whose abilities and destinies were unleashed because of computers.

 

We cannot assume that people are missing out on the good life if they don’t know how to work an iPod.

But to completely dismiss computers and computer literacy because it brings along some myths of overzealous promise is unwise.

Computers can be powerful tools for discovering identities and understanding how power is negotiated. InColin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s article, “’New’ Literacies: Research and Social Practice,” the authors analyze “‘new’ literacies” (which at the time of the article’s publication are new but today are more broadly accepted as commonplace)

in the form of blogs, online fan fiction and “synchronous online communities (this appears to be a precursor to things like World of Warcraft).

It took me awhile to wrap my head around the idea that each online community represents a separate discourse community, thereby offering an individual the ability to become literate within that discourse community.

Each community: fan fiction fans, synchronous online community members, and bloggers, all three of these discourses offered community members avenues for re-imagining their identities and expressing themselves in ways that conventional media and reading and writing outlets had not.

Lankshear and Knobel classify communication through fan fiction and online synchronous communities as “relationship technology” rather than “information technology” (while blogs seem to stand in both categories), and they argue that awareness of these literacies can be applied in the classroom. I would rephrase this suggestion as “know your population. ”

Framing curriculum in formats that are personally compelling for students is beneficial in terms of engagement for the students. Students can have “authority” over their school assignments in ways that traditional research papers may not allow, capitalizing on the “relationship technology” that youth are so adept at navigating.

An article in A New Literacies Sampler continues along similar lines as Lankshear and Knobel. In “Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy” by Jennifer Stone, Stone explores how popular websites used by teenagers support literacy practices encouraged in schools (a la Robert Brooke’s “Underlife and Writing Instruction” wherein the transgressive activities of students in class actually reinforce classroom goals). In Stone’s research she observes youth using the rhetorical skills that complement classroom practices. Stone suggests that schools can help students to “begin addressing the convergence of genres, modalities, and inter-textuality to promote consumption” (61) that is inherent in many popular websites.

In conclusion, it may be beneficial to use technological literacy in the classroom as a tool for empowerment and self-realization, but it is necessary not to overstate what our claim of “literacy” offers students. We are offering them tools, but we are not necessarily offering liberation or morality. It is also important to note that the tools benefit not just the students, but also, us, as teachers in our ability to engage our students.

Embracing New Literacies in Curriculum and Instruction

A complicated subject, technology and its relationship to what we see as the “writing world,” seems to at times be a positive synchronization of goals.  At others, an attempt to make the “cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions,” align is a futile effort.    Emerging literacy’s are difficult to define and thus difficult for instructor’s to implement into their classrooms.  Language attempts to provide ways in which to hang in the balance between what Anne Wysocki stated above in Blinded By the Letter, about literacy’s ever-changing role in technology and its more traditional place in the history of printed word.

Our world is moving towards a place where interactive texts are becoming equally as valuable to some users as printed texts.  Lankshear and Knobel write in their article, New Literacies: Research and Social Practice,  “Within this broad frame we distinguish  between (new) literacy’s that might be regarded as ontologically new and literacy’s that while being chronologically recent, are not necessarily ontologically new.  The idea of “ontologically” new literacies is the idea of literacies that constitute or are constituted by a new kind of “stuff.”

If we consider the social context of writing and new technological literacies, we can see that these theorists are advocating for a convergence of constructed relations between the information available to us as consumers of text and the broader strokes of  literacy through technology that may be read, but likewise, seen and heard.  Understanding that communication happens amongst many different platforms, incorporating evolving ideas of “new literacy” into our thinking and teaching could impact the level of engagement in our classrooms.  Integration of these new literacies must be judged on an applied basis, because theory alone cannot judge whether or not these new literacies are strengthening our pedagogy’s.

Julie Davies and Guy Merchant state in Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy propose that, “the production and consumption of blogs is seen as a new form of social practice, dependent upon specific genres of writing and meaning making- a practice which reconfigures relationships and  can engender new ways of looking at the world.” Based on this assessment, can we propose that “new technological literacy’s” are inherently tangential to reconfiguring the way we see communication in the world.  Can we use the blogs we read and write to form a new approach to the acquisition of literacy?  Global discourses are readily available and knowledge that had been untapped in previous generations is present for evaluation and utilization because of these new literacies.  Cultural practices can be explored and thus enriched through classroom research. This challenges the fundamental basis of books as the dominant way to convey and receive information.

Trends of interest and significance can be assessed on a semester by semester basis, coupling these new availabilities with the latest research on the subject.  According to Ladislaus Semali in Defining New Literacies in Curricular Practice,  “Over the past quarter century, communication technologies have spawned an explosion of ways in which “text,” both written and electronic, has become part of the out-of-class curriculum. This explosion has outpaced our pedagogy, our curricula and methods of instruction, and the definitions of what it means to be literate in a multimedia society.”  In short, what it means to be literate in a post-typographic society is going to change as these new literacies come about.

I am personally attracted to alternate methods of teaching writing because the traditional mode of critical thinking can be replaced with a true critical analysis of multiple mediums.  The unraveling of several layers available in this context makes new literacies exciting, and in turn, can provide a greater level of engagement for the students we are hoping to reach.  We must not prefer to lean on our own ideologies about curriculum.  We must instead continue to research thoroughly the mechanisms by which we can create new literacy realities. The Canadian Council on Learning has put out a release implying that comic books, science fiction adventures, and media related reading/writing attract young men and school aged boys.  Using these widely available materials is said to be increasing reading ability.  According to this release boys and young men fall well behind the performance of young girls and young women in reading/writing tasks.  Embracing change (new literacies), offering new outlets for student progression, enhancing participation and pleasure in the task of reading/writing, can and will soon be the way of instructing in the modern world.

Phaedrus, Composition, and Walter Ong: the enduring buzz

Rhetoric/Composition scholars and teachers love a classical reference – perhaps they lend the whole endeavor a bit of gravitas that pedagogical discussions, as essential as they are, may sometimes lack. Stanford’s Andrea Lunsford, known for her work on the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments as well as the Stanford Study of Writing, uses Plato’s Phaedrus as the first assigned reading in her class, “Memory and Media.” So it seems that I, as a recent reader of this dialogue, have stumbled into good scholarly company.

Plato preferred direct participation in the Socratic dialectic — but he wasn’t above writing to make a point.

Such a community of readers has apparently been so gathered in contemplation of the Phaedrus for some years.  As early as 1985, Jesuit scholar Walter Ong noted, “It has lately become fashionable in some linguistic circles to refer to Plato’s condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus . . .” (27).  This aside, included in Ong’s contribution to The Written Word:  Literacy in Transition, “Writing Restructures Thought,” embodies his offering during the “Wolson College Lectures” of 1985, the proceedings of which are collected in The Written Word.  In a turn that may strike you as ironic in just a moment, Ong’s essay, circulated in print, was at least occasioned by the oral performance of an Oxford graduate college’s annual lecture series.

Walter Ong, PhD

But before offering further comments on Ong, I should consider:  Why the long-standing scholarly fascination with Plato’s Phaedrus, especially among teachers?  Is it warranted?

One answer is the Phaedrus appeals to us because it can be read (with only a slightly a-historical bit of solipsistic tweaking) as a warning to those of us who might view our own technological moment, suffused as it is within its numinous penumbra of digital text, with trepidation, suspicion, or else a simple conservative longing for the scribble-ridden and type-set hardcopy world of our youth.

That is, and strange as it may sound, we can take as an allegory of our time the story Plato unfolds in his dialogue between Socrates and his interlocutor, the stolid Phaedrus, a tale of how an Egyptian king of great perspicacity rejects a deity’s offer of the technology of writing.  In Plato’s dialogue, King Thamos refutes the ibis-headed Theuth’s (aka Thoth’s) claim that writing will “make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories,” thereby granting them greater wisdom.  Plato offers many reasons for prioritizing the Socratic dialectic, and the oral exchange upon which it depends, as a method of inquiry which, for Plato  was always a pursuit rich with moral implications (cf the Allegory of the Cave or even The Republic).  After all, Plato felt that the soul itself was what did man’s best thinking.

Here’s the more self-interested update that we cannot help but read between the lines:  Our society’s benevolent technocrats, wielding the almost divine productive power of late-industrial society, have placed us in the almost royal position of being able to accept or reject a kind of writing, writing.2+, digital writing.  Are we going to do as did the curmudgeonly Thamus and look the proverbial god in the beak?  Or shall we rejoice at our good fortune?

I am not, of course, alone in this baseline reading of this Platonic dialog. Ong offered much the same comparison in ‘85 and, going further, explained how “Plato’s objections against writing are essentially the very same objections commonly urged today against computers by those who object to them” (27).

Of the several criticisms Ong explores, I find most fascinating his response to Plato’s sense that text is limited by its inability to respond to its reader’s queries.  When Socrates describes a communication of “unquestioned legitimacy,” he emphasizes knowledge that is “written in the soul of the learner:  that can defend itself, and knows to whom it should speak and to whom it should say nothing.”  That is, Plato emphasizes oral communication between people who can probe one another’s claims and gauge the impact of their words upon their living audience.

To respond to this part of Phaedrus on behalf of computer literati everywhere, Ong has to first explain in serious terms the allegorical reading I limned above, to show how Plato’s reservations about the unresponsiveness of writing typify contemporary gripes about computer-generated textuality.  Briefly dabbling in vernacular expression, Ong writes, “In the Modern Critique of the computer, the same objection is put, “Garbage in, garbage out; so deeply are we into literacy that we fail commonly to recognize that this objection applies every bit as much to books as to computers.  If a book states an untruth, ten thousand printed refutations will do nothing to the printed text . . . . .  Texts are essentially contumacious” (27).  Ong’s assertion of an underlying textual contumacity, the tendency of the meaning made of a text by readers to depart from that which was intended by the responsible author(ity), will surprise no readers of “Literacy Restructures Thought” coming to the conversation with literary-critical notches in their repertorial belts.

Let us be clear, though, that Ong’s note about writing’s obliviousness to authority does not represent his point of view:  that is the “They Say” (to use half of the analytical formulation made current by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s eminently practical writing text) to which Ong then responds.  Ong finds Plato’s critique of writing uncompelling because writing was used to frame it – and not only literally, on the page, but as a technology that, “Restructures Thought,” as in the titular claim of his essay.  Ong avers,  “The technology of writing was not merely useful to Plato for broadcasting his critique of writing, but it also had been responsible for bringing the critique into existence . . . his philosophically analytic thought was possible only because of the effects that writing was having on mental processes.”  Ong feels that Plato failed to engage in (or else failed to fully report) in what we might call meta-cognition about the sources of his own thinking, which supports Ong’s secondary contention, that we tend to be blind to the degree to which technology enables our innermost thought processes.  The situation become difficult, Ong supposes, for “[o]nce the word is technologized, there is no really effective way to criticize its condition without the aid of the technology you are criticizing.  The complaints about these . . . inventions are all the same because writing and print and the computer all ways of technologizing the word” (28).

Conceiving of language’s technologicization offers us ample moments to contemplate the use of technology/language with ironic self-reflection.  Can I, writer whose sense of himself as such was learned at about the rate I learned to type (with somewhat haphazard accuracy) on an electric typewriter in a high school “Typing 1” classroom, really opine with complete clarity from behind the screen of my MacBookPro on either typographic or digital technologies?  And what do we make of Ong’s own words in “Writing Restructures Thought,” an essay, now digitized, that we might otherwise encounter in a printed volume, as noted above, that purports to capture the verbal performances of an Oxford college lecture series?

To turn back to our cartoonish royal dilemma, Ong’s main insight — that every iteration of  the technologized word creates, or “restructures” a corresponding iteration in human consciousness —  raises the stakes of our previously easy choice:  If you were king for a day, and an Ibis-headed programmer/god offered you digital writing, would you accept it into the society you were meant to safeguard if you knew that adopting that tool would forever alter the very thought processes of your subjects in a manner so profound that they would have difficulty achieving any awareness of the change?

Ong’s direction helps us appreciate just a bit of Plato’s trepidation, his need to spin a mythic yarn that sets the stage for him to note some reservations about the written word.  Plato liked the orality that suffused his culture, even though he availed himself off and penned written texts.  To offer a humble example from our own moment, I still like to print longer articles, even though I secure the articles through a laptop and wireless network.

Looking good?  Or, extending Ong, might we suffer from a digital “squint”? Should we trust our own judgment about digital technologies and their (re)structural impact upon our thoughts?

While Ong responds to Plato’s depiction of text as unresponsive, noting that the same could be said of digital text, I see the matter, writing as I do from a more fully realized moment of digital culture, quite differently.  Seeking parallels, Ong argues that we can make the same argument about computer-based text Plato did about chirographic (handwritten) text.  But our experience of hypertextual digital media is not of a kind with that we have of printed text.

Consider the potentially responsive nature of digital text:  If you gently mock a friend’s ranting on facebook, he is all too likely to counter with a jest of his own.  Post a quibble on a writer’s blog, and the author may well write back, publicly, perhaps thanking you for the point of clarification, perhaps taking you to task for an obtuse point of reasoning of your own.  Slander a teacher on “Rate My Professor,” and she or he may well offer a dexterous riposte on the same forum.

Thus we may have to qualify for ourselves Ong’s assertion that the underlying contumacy of texts (27) is equivalent in the oral and digital eras.  If anything, I find the “agonistic mentality of oral cultures” (28) is more widespread in a world of digital textuality.  The idea that the text cannot defend itself reflects a reified approaching to media; the text is alienated from the authorial labor, and is discussed as if it assumes agency in her stead.  However, if a text retains its connection to an author (or, for that matter, a set of authors), a connection that can be rendered live at any moment, across any worldly distance, we no longer need, as Plato seemed to do, to both fear and fetishize the text as a chimaeric automaton that alienates utterance from author in perpetuity.  Hypertextuality preserves the author-textual bond valorized by Plato’s emphasis on oral exchange, thereby troubling Ong’s characterization of them as parallel developments.

Though his work in “Literacy Restructures Thought” could not include much analysis of the features of digital literacy, such as hypertext, Ong expected great things from it, and he wanted to help his readers shake off the “chirotic squint commonly afflicting cultures that have deeply interiorized writing” and accept his idea that “[w]riting is a consciousness raising and humanizing technology” (48).

And it may be just that; composition instructors certainly tend to laud it as such.  But perhaps we shouldn’t take this as an article of faith.  In fact, several sources urge us to pause, lest we expect too much of the digital update to Thoth’s scrivened largesse.

Dennis Baron, author of “Fom Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology”

In “Pencils to Pixels” Professor Dennis Baron gives the Phaedrus this capsule discussion:  ‘Plato was one leading thinker who spoke out strongly against writing, fearing that it would weaken our memories.  Pessimistic complaints about new literacy technologies, like those made by Plato . . . . are balanced by inflated predictions of how technologies will change our lives for the better” (4).

In Ong, I think we certainly have a case of the kind of rosy prescience to which Baron alludes.  And while I value how Ong’s grand narrative can help us begin our thinking about the possible impact of literacy upon oral cultures, I feel, as does Rhetoric/Composition PhD student Timothy Dougherty, author of the blog New Seeds, that Ong’s categories, and the conclusions he draws about them, may be both overly simplistic and suggest an untenable cultural bias.

Timothy  Dougherty writes that Walter Ong’s essay “Writing Restructures Thought” is “a classic piece, much maligned (and for good reason).”

Dougherty’s critique emphasizes  Ong’s description of oral cultures as “synthetic” in their dominant thought process and literate cultures as “analytic,” as we saw in Plato’s case.  No doubt schooled in deconstruction himself, Dougherty sees Ong’s fundamental oppositional distinction between oral and literate cultures to be, “so impoverished it barely warrants scrutiny.”  He goes on:  “Not only does [“Writing Restructures Thought”] assign these binaries roughshod over cultures, it also retains an eerie faith in analytic thinking over synthetic, in cultures always evolving, developing, from less sophisticated to more sophisticated” (Dougherty’s emphasis).

In my own reading of Ong, I noted that in making his case that writing’s properties can be “good for us” (32), his thinking rests upon the common teleological assumption that cultural change is always cultural progress.  Writing, for Ong, creates “the evolution of consciousness as nothing else before it does” (32).  It is in passages such as this in which a value-laden, even ethnocentric message becomes legible:  by describing the alteration of consciousness as “evolutionary,” Ong subscribes to the narrative of progress that so often legitimates dominant, even imperial points of view, while justifying the erasure of others from historical memory.  By assume that the cultural change under discussion is “evolutionary,” Ong of course tends to privilege the print culture in which he was raised and made his way as a professional member of an intellectual elite.

If we abandon the assumption that literate culture is somehow superior to oral culture, what are we left with?  I am uncertain if we can claim anything than this: writing-based cultures are qualitatively distinct from oral cultures; writing did indeed change things, but we should hesitate to ascribe value to that shift, particularly when, as Ong points out, literate cultures tend to preserve themselves, displace others, and place themselves in a position to take others as object of study (26-27).  That is, there is history of contestation and domination lurking in the margins of Ong’s tale of the “evolution of consciousness.”  From the vantage point Ong offers us, we must consider carefully if we have the means to identify what may have been lost.

 Ong offers another and similarly value-laden judgment with the manner in which he attempts to support his assertion that, “[t]echnology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it” (32).  His evidence for his claim, a discussion of the “precision-tooled” technological acumen that supports the functioning of the Western orchestra (32), is an oddly ethnocentric and futurist-leaning self justification, one that implicitly esteems the musical expression of Western literate culture above the music of not only Western antiquity, but every oral culture the world has ever known.

Again, I would recognize what seems most valid in Ong’s argument:  that technology creates real changes in lived experience.  As a player of electric instruments, I know well that I am a sort of   crude technician – from changing strings to replacing vacuum tubes in amplifiers to testing batteries in signal processing pedals, I do maintenance upon the tools of my (hobbyist’s) trade.  But, even so, I would hesitate to affix a superior cultural value to the product of these efforts, for to be do so would only esteems my own experience of my own culture, and render even less likely any kind of effective analysis of it.

None of these reservations about Ong’s work empty it of all utility.  Unlike, Dougherty, I feel Ong’s distinctions between oral and literate cultures (plural!), sweeping as they are, still allow him to unveil perspicacious distinctions based upon the categories he constructs.  For example, Ong writes, “Even informal person-to person conversations between literates are not structured like those among persons in a primary oral culture.  Simple queries for information acquire a new status. . .” (36).

Here, for example, if we extrapolate this distinction forward from the oral/literary divide to the typographic/digital shift of our own time, I find Ong’s words remarkably prescient.  Digitally literate societies do indeed hold conversations in new ways (facebook, IM, skype, text, twitter, etc.) and the engines of query (google, worldcat, etc.) have gained a profound preeminence, thereby mirroring the corresponding changes Ong noted in the shift from oral to literate society.

Ong was one thinker to identify the enduring centrality of the query.  The text being searched in this image:  “Where is my mind?”

After reading Ong, I say, let us accept our technological moment, but avoid the trap of ideological narcissism that can lead us to into excessive self-validation.  Such a position is unlikely to lead to good thinking, and poor reasoning about the world is unlikely, I believe, to lead to good teaching.  I contend that we cannot, from our vantage point, presume to know if the people of oral cultures live or lived any more or less completely than do we.  Perhaps it is safest to assume that technological acumen impacts human consciousness with a price, if only in that once thought is, in Ongian terms, “restructured,” we are poorly equipped to recall quite precisely what we once were.

Should we embrace digital literacy and textuality?  Of course, but, to bring another Greek term into the matter, we might avoid the hubris of assuming the superiority of the consciousness that finds such technology appealing; rather, we should attempt to avoid, as much as possible, replacing the “chirographic squint” Ong postulated with an equally obfuscatory “digital squint.”

Neither do we, as members of culture undergoing a transition from one textual mode to another, assume a reactionary stance, as Plato seems to have done.  He was of an oral culture assessing the meaning of its own chirographic literacy.  I was born on the cusp of the ascendant digital literacy and, as an educator vested in the future, it behooves me to refrain from either a conservative attachment to the kind of print culture through which I became literate, or a conversely disproportionate overvaluation of features intrinsic to digital text.

Plato’s Lament

To my surprise, I was struck with the age-old lament present in Plato’s Phaedrus that the new technology, in this circumstance – writing – will alter the fabric and structure of society, and result in its inevitable decline. Imbued with today’s contemporary discourse over the fear and uncertainty, or excitement and fervor in many quarters, concerning the digitalization of all things print, I had not consciously thought of writing, the actual words, characters taken and put on tablet or parchment, as a form of new technology or revolutionary advancement since grade school. The current state of rapid digital turnover in the twenty first century seems less significant than the conversion of oral language to the new written form.

Through Socrates, Plato laments with increasing anxiety over the potential loss of one’s mastery of memory, and the distance that emerges by capturing the oral and making it written. Moreover, the absence of an appropriate interpreter and teacher who controls the knowledge, which Socrates decries “drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it” (118). The underlying sentiment that disturbs me in the artificial dialectic between Socrates and Phaedrus is that Plato seems to envision a “right type” of student and thinker that is most deserving of this advanced knowledge rather than a more democratic, and yes, modern vision for the dissemination of knowledge.

I realize that this excerpt from Phaedrus is over two thousand years old and it may be unfair to impose a modern sensibility on the idea of who has access to knowledge. But many of Plato’s ideas seem pertinent in today’s quickly changing Internet landscape – does this new technology improve the current curriculum or does it diminish it, making it a mere reflection and unequal substitute of the former model?

Dennis Baron offers further technological advances in the development of writing in his “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies” outlining the “new literacy technologies “ that were developed after the advent of the clay tablet, taking the form of the printing press, telegraph, typewriter, telephone and most significantly the pencil. Each of these new technologies propelled the dissemination of the now written word into more hands that I suspect would not necessarily please Plato. The modern corollary to Plato’s argument is that the Internet provides unfettered, undiluted access to just about everything and to everyone with access to a computer, but as Barron aptly points out “literacy has always functioned to divide haves from have nots, and the problem of access to computers will not be easy to solve” (132).

A final thought on Phaedrus, Plato employs the new technology of writing that he fears and decries in crafting his own argument, as Walter J. Ong points out in “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought” that a critical “weakness in Plato’s position is that he put these misgivings about writing into writing” (28), which suggests that Plato recognized the power of the new technology as he debated for the older way – Plato’s thoughts once again finding resonance in today’s uncertain, shifting digital world.

Technowriting Evolved: Resistance is futile

I had already begun considering the process of biological evolution, even before I got to the last article in the series, Alex Reid’s “The Evolution of Writing” from The Two Virtuals. If we consider that humans have invented new technologies long before the computer, and that these technologies include the written word, as outlined by Walter Ong and Dennis Baron, then we must go back even further to the invention of the spoken word itself, the thing that eventually made our societies so complex that we needed writing to order the things we said and thought.  Go back further, and you see anthropologists refer to the human revolution in the wheel and other mechanical objects; earlier, stone tool-making forward to iron and so forth.  Even further, I thought, we should consider the evolution of communication itself.  But why stop there? Is not every evolution, every step that brought us to now, an advance in technology that changes our abilities to get around in our environments?

Now, as I write this, I have only read the opening of Reid’s text, and I shall read it in its entirety after I have finished this post.  This requires some discipline on my part, because clearly it leads where I was supposed to go, and like all literature majors, I want to know the ending.  But today I want to try something different: I want to venture down this path blindfolded and see if I end up in a similar place.  Maybe it’s the anthropology major in me, finally exercising its desires after having been suppressed inside an English teacher for so long.

I enjoyed the supreme irony in Plato’s dialogue of Socrates and Phaedrus which prizes the oral and denigrates the written, even as Plato sees fit to commit that argument to writing.  I feel that most people still don’t see that, even now, in this moment, the “virtual world” is still very much organized around alphabetic technology: Writing.  Plato wrote his argument in the form of a dialogue between two people, who weren’t actually there discussing it; in so doing, he borrowed an oral form to get the idea into print.

Science-fiction has seen the future, and it is the cyborg: A human-machine hybrid, usually evil and unconcerned with the preservation of “unplugged” humanoids.  Like the Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation, assimilation is the only evolution, “resistance is futile.” But what remains today is that our heroes resist against all odds and prevail, like the stories over the campfire millennia before us. Small bands of native resistance pop up, like that established by the singular Borg named Hugh who develops a soft spot for humans after spending time with them away from the Borg Collective, or the underground city appropriately named Zion from The Matrix films.  I ask now: Who’s borrowing from what here?

It was tough for Plato to wrap his brain around what was happening to him in the moment he wrote that what is spoken is superior to print.  I think Henry David Thoreau’s rejection of the telegraph, at the same time as he perfected pencil manufacture (another tool) in order to keep himself writing at Walden Pond, is a similar sort of technology-related “brain fart.” I have a tough time trying to imagine a world where my son and his progeny will be human-computer cyborgs of anything but an evil kind.  This doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen, and probably (I hope) in ways that are not evil, but only different.  Although I’m sure my son would love to grow up to be Darth Vader or General Grievous, cyborgs of that other science-fiction juggernaut we geeks love so well.

Evolution, even technological evolution, takes time.  After I graduated from Cal in 1996 with the aforementioned degree in English and Anthropology, I tried my hand at learning to code HTML.  It was not pretty, and I couldn’t do it.  It it felt, for me, like my failure to master calculus as a freshman and subsequently giving up on being a vet, a doctor, or a chimpanzee researcher: I simply could not order my world that way.  I just wanted to communicate, and maybe ride the Web 1.0 to early retirement.  But now, fifteen years later, I can use what grew out of that desire to communicate and use the tools others built for me to use, and explore in this blog, and in my own blog, and in the blog I created for my students to use, and teach them to establish and use their own and those of their classmates.  And ultimately, I get to do what I was always pretty good at in the first place: Write.  But while I did have to wait, I didn’t have to wait very long, comparatively; I established my very first blog in 2001.  On an evolutionary timescale, that’s too small a period to measure. But on my personal timescale, that’s the period when I went from being unable to keep plants alive to having a son of my own.  I must have evolved! Or grown up.

I think, like many things in their nascent forms, there will be system crashes and temper tantrums as the bugs and kinks get worked out.  There will be people railing against the digital revolution until something replaces it as the Next Big Thing.  But historically, most of these things have never turned out to be as evil as The Borg.  And if resistance is futile, then embracing technology and being on the forefront of its responsible use, especially in the writing classroom, becomes our next responsibility.

Understanding the Evolution of Writing Technology

Image credit: Laughload.com

Though more light-hearted than the many alarmed educators who decry that an age of illiteracy is upon us (see Berkmann: “TXTNG: THE GR8 DB8”), this cartoon satirizes the role of technology in distancing students from their education.

Wednesday morning, watching high school juniors attempt unguided research (rather than typing their first drafts) using questionable methods and getting equally questionable results, I pondered the utility of technology in the classroom. Later that day, deftly maneuvering between my laptop’s split-screen (Google Chrome on the right, displaying a pdf along with numerous tabs of research material, and on the left, Microsoft Onenote, with very organized notes in progress on my current reading and past class discussions) I remembered my early relationship with technology.; learning to type with Mavis Beacon and later creating a website about the Salem Witch Trials. It struck me not only how integral a part of my education technology had become, but also how long it had taken to condition myself to use technology so productively.

I think it is imperative to our understanding of the use of technology in the composition classroom that we view new technologies as another step forward in the evolution of writing technology.  We need to look back at the technologies which led to this point with an understanding of what they were made to accomplish, the damage they were posited to cause, and the actual outcomes of each.

Dennis Baron, in “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies,” holds up change in writing technology as a mirror to patterns in the development of literacy.  Although we rarely look at a pencil as a shocking technological innovation, Baron points out that the pencil “underwent changes in form, greatly expanded its functions, and developed from a curiosity of use to cabinet-makers, artists and note-takers into a tool so universally employed for writing that we seldom give it any thought.” And why should we? Today the pencil is a given; it sits in wait among our pens, highlighters, and dry-erase markers, prepared to do its duty whenever we need to jot a note.  When we use it to annotate a lecture or briefing, we certainly don’t contemplate how in its use we are separating the word from the living present.

As Walter J Ong explains in “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” the evolution of writing technology has allowed us to move from a completely oral/aural world, to one that incorporates vision and allows for numerous forms of division and distance that permit transformations of consciousness in society. “Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing  its thoughts in oral form.”  In The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition Alexander Reid looks beyond how technology has affected our minds looking at the evolution of writing to propose a theory of the “virtual-actual.”  Reid explains that embodied cognition, consciousness and technology are interconnected, and that humans were predisposed to develop writing based on the social need to process knowledge outside of our bodies.

Armed with these authors’ contributions to our understanding of writing technology, I hope future educators will consider how serious a disadvantage their students will suffer if they are not allowed the opportunity to process knowledge the way many of their peers will have had ample opportunity to practice.