Myahinternectivity

Once upon a time, each of my roommates in college and I went to different places to study abroad, and we all came back with the obligatory Study Abroad Soundtrack from our individual experiences.  On the night of our big reunion from our times away, each of us took turns playing our soundtrack/s.  I played my soundtrack first, and a Brazilian dance song, “Festa no Ape”, came on.  It had always made me laugh for its insipid lyrics and irresistible beat.  As they listened, my roommates became confused, and each went to retrieve her soundtrack.  They removed my CD- that’s what we had at the time- from the stereo, and one by one each of them put her individual soundtrack in and played a different version of “Myahee”.   We had all come back from different countries with an alternate remix of the same song.  When I got my first definition of what a meme was, this song and situation were the first things I thought of. 

The song emerges as a platform for Michael Wesch to discuss the ways that Youtube reflects certain changing aspects of culture based on digital literacies, so when I watched his “An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube”, I got pretty excited in my reminiscing. 

For more reasons than the fact that he reflects on some of my happy college days, Wesch’s theories have almost single-handedly revolutionized my ideas about the internet and connectivity.  I had always sort of considered the internet to be an alienating force where teenagers and lonely people could make up idealized versions of themselves to present to a hyper-reality of life, but Wesch shows it to be as a mighty, massive tool for connection between people from all over the globe.  In fact, he does so in such a way that as I watched his video, I began to marvel that I hadn’t seen it this way before.  He takes the time to examine the paradox between simultaneously talking to nobody and (hypothetically) everybody, and discusses almost the almost Lacanian “mirror” state of being able to watch ourselves as entities on Youtube. 

Wesch’s video made me appreciate the idea that we can continuously remake ourselves online, and that we have also become more accountable for single, out-of-context events (he talks about an off-the-cuff remark made by John McCain about bombing Iran).  It all seems more true to reality than I had every considered these online constructions to be; we are always remaking our identities, and we have no control over the way people perceive us based on a single encounter.   Whereas I would have seen people on Youtube mimicking the Myahee guy as derisive, Wesch sees them as paying homage to a stranger’s obvious and infectious joie de vivre.  I had never considered this angle, and I sort of like it a lot more than my previous notions of the internet. 

Wesch’s video makes the internet exciting for me; it turns the internet into a world of opportunity.  What multitude of possibilities could Youtube alone hold for teaching?  The idea of remix, cultural scripts, identity, the problematization of copyright, fine lines between plagiarism and paying homage to art, music, visuals… the possibilities seem endless and exciting.

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.  A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). (Jenkins 1)

When Henry Jenkins describes “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture”, he offers the above definition.  Jenkins is concerned with how modern literacy has been affected by New Media literacy practices, and what these changes may entail for teachers of writing and rhetoric. He makes an important and gentle claim about the value of using the internet as a format for allowing students to engage in a rhetorical culture “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement”, in a setting in which they “believe that their contributions matter”.

Taken out of context, however, the above quote seems applicable to any number of venues for amateur artistic expression; the internet has simply provided a widespread and massively available context for such expression.  It seems that any format for creation wherein students are given time and freedom to develop and express ideas, and to take time after development and creation to comment on or critique the creations of others, is a platform for participatory culture to emerge.

Although I appreciate Jenkins’s thorough and unassuming argument about the importance of taking digital literacies into account in a composition classroom, I wonder where our responsibilities to our students lie given this broad definition of a participatory culture.  I am struggling with how to effectively convey this idea, so I suppose I will just have to offer the following example.

Every year in Thailand there is a festival called Loy Krathong.  When I taught there, my students took a whole week during school to prepare for Loy Krathong by making the miniature floats they would offer to the water in return for fulfillment of their dreams.  Teachers brought in palm fronds, orchids, jasmine flowers, and took time out of each class to teach students how to weave shapes and incorporate flowers in their creations, and gave them ample time to simply construct their floats.

Thai woman with Loy Krathong float

At the end of the week, students had borrowed and lent ideas from each other and from teachers, and had produced some magnificent (and extremely varied, given the small number of materials the used) pieces of art.  The teachers put their students’ floats on display, and students were given a whole day to examine each other’s pieces, talk about the floats, to consider why certain ones were more effective than others, and to make last-minute changes if they wanted.  At nightfall, everyone in the “village” headed to the bay to light their candles, say their prayers, and hope their floats made it as far as possible to sea.

Jenkins’s article does narrow its focus to describe online literacy events, but the fact that “participatory culture” plays such a huge role in his argument still gives me pause.  The kind of exploratory, guided creation, recreation, and criticism demonstrated by my Thai students’ participation during Loy Kratong still appears to me to represent a kind of participatory culture.  If this assessment is even remotely true, then part of what Jenkins touts as the literary power of the internet is its ability to connect people, not just in through literacy, but also by artistic expression.  The internet is an audio-visual-literary experience, not just a place to compose.  If this is true, then I return to a lot of the discomfort I feel about techno-literacy practices.  How does this effectively transform my job as a Composition teacher?  How can I deny the artistic undercurrent of digital literacy practices, and how am I supposed to teach them when there are so many?

J. Elizabeth Clark discusses “The Digital Imperative” of including internet-based new-media technologies in our classes, citing specifically her success with “ePortfolios.”  Unlike Jenkins’s piece, Clark launches a veritable attack on traditional, linear composition strategies, stating:

Myopic, Luddite fantasies of returning to pencil and paper, the disavowal of the role of technology in the classroom, and the supposition that technology is a passing fad are tired arguments now giving way to a new era of digital rhetoric where, more than ever before, people are becoming authors every day, constructing digital profiles, public commentary, and using publicly available resources to research and inform their opinions.

Clark’s position is extreme, and the more I read of her piece, the angrier I become, even as I return to it later.  How can she vilify pen and paper without taking into remote account the fact that vast swaths of humanity exist for whom pen and paper are luxuries?  Let’s head back to my classroom in Thailand, where I was lucky to have chalk for the black board, let alone paper, worksheets, or printed materials.  The language lab was locked, collecting dust, because the technology in it was so precious they didn’t actually trust students to use it.  Clark discusses her class, “How Fiction Can Change the World”, and I think to myself how wonderful it must be to conceive of a world so small that our Western perception of digital literacy is the only one that exists, with no reference paid to all the other possible cultural expressions of digital literacy, a world in which one Chinese student (and Clark’s only example of non-American literate uses of technology), had to actually come to America to become “literarily” liberated.  What is so wrong with pens and paper if it is all a student has, and if he or she is lucky to have them at that?  Should we continue to denigrate non- “new-media” technological literacies under adverse financial circumstances?  Now who’s being myopic?

I understand that Clark is talking about a “first-world” literacy, but I would like her please to get off her technological high horse and get some real-world perspective.  I love the idea of including visual literacy in my classroom, but I return to the question of what my job as writing teacher is.  When Lawrence Lessig describes “Read-Write Culture” in his TED Talk, he provides hilarious examples of digital adaptations that combine music with visual aids and literary rhetoric.  Do I have to teach these applications to my students because I am an American teacher?  What if I want to return to Thailand?

By choosing to study composition, I’ve found myself standing on a critically entangled dialectical nexus of modern philosophy.  Suddenly we are forced to return to the Phaedrus– how can art exist without structure?  Where is the line between reading and writing- where does one start and the other end, and can one exist without the other?  How is it possible that Literature and Composition studies exist in tension?  How can Composition Studies not be a discipline, when it is essentially the platform of all disciplines?  And now, how can old and new literacy practices exist in their individual paradigms without one another? Can we even begin to conceive of scope of possibilities for artistic and literary pursuits that the internet provides?  These articles are trying to deconstruct a modern moment of transition, which seems a little ridiculous- surely we will only truly understand the implications of the move to digital literacy after it has been in more general effect for more than the two and a half nano-seconds of human literacy practice that it represents thus far.

Part of my opposition to these ideas is simply that I find the exhaustive array of possible literacy activities dizzying, and I don’t know where I need to be beginning with my students, who, by the way, don’t know how to punctuate their sentences correctly enough to convey clear meaning in some cases.  I would love it if my job were that of  “literary art teacher”, helping to navigate students through all the different possibilities for rhetorical expression in a plethora of new media forms.   But is it, really?  Or would my students rather just not sound like idiots who dangle participles left and right on cover letters for professional jobs?…“Covered in melted cheese, the rhetoricians devoured the pizza…” Meme that, J. Elizabeth Clark.

De-Reification in the Digital Age

It comes as a shock for me every time realize that my students don’t know teachers are people, too.  When I was teaching adult ESL, it didn’t matter how many invitations I got to coffee or birthday parties; as soon as I started approaching a group of giggling students, the laughter would die down immediately if the “funny-fodder” was even remotely interesting. Now that I am teaching freshman composition for the first time, things have taken on a level of downright hilarity.  Adult ESL students at least saw me as a being that existed on the same plane of reality as they did.  These days, I am almost convinced myself that I actually cease to exist as soon as my students exit the classroom.  I think they are astonished to learn that I’m capable of re-materializing during office hours, and I don’t blame them.  After all, I suppose it was not so long ago that I myself made snide comments about not speaking to professors in any human capacity “until I’ve seen them bleed.”  It remains a surprise to have been relegated to that category myself, although I don’t know why it still surprises me, seeing as how I have just collected an essay from my students wherein I asked them to describe some aspect of slang and turn it into an argument about academic language.  Of course they think I am a robot.

When I met with each of my students as they embarked upon this essay, we arrived almost inevitably every time at the conclusion that when they wrote academically, they didn’t like it because they “lost personality” or became “boring.”  I loved the distinction here: they were not bored by academic writing, they were boring by academic writing.  Putting ideas into academic language has a homogenizing quality, a way of distilling any extreme flavors for the sake of appealing to a wider audience (we can’t all take the heat of Thai chilies, and if you haven’t grown up eating durian, forget about trying.  Ever.).  It makes sense that we have to make our arguments palatable to more people, over a wider range of time and experience, but the process of doing so can feel like it drains the life out of the writing.  We are forced to explain in an abundance of details that which seems obvious to a modern audience, and we must do so in as inoffensive a way possible.

So no wonder students think academics aren’t human.  Not only do teachers have to teach their students the variety of writing that necessarily asks them to distill their personalities and seems to suck the life out of every great idea, teachers themselves engage in this kind of writing on a regular basis.

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, in “Blinded by the Letter”, discuss the dangers of academic literacy conventions my students seem to so resent:

“To the book, writers [discussed in the article] attribute our sense of self, our memories, our possibilities, the specific linear forms of analysis we use, our attitude towards knowledge, our belief in the authority of certain kinds of knowledge, our sense of the world…” but “[w]hat else might we be-or be open to-if we did not see ourselves and our world so defined in books?” (728)

The language of “the book” is that which defines all sense of knowledge and understanding, but which must do so in such a way as to transcend temporality.  This language encompasses all linear academic literacy practices that Hull (via Wysocki and Johnson Eilola) describes an “all-purpose flour” model for language, one that at once ignores the socio-economic constructs underlying them, and produces the uncomfortable, personality-stifling effects my students discussed with me in their conferences.

No wonder, then, that students prefer the kind of writing they engage in with the “New Literacies” described by Lankshear and Knobel .  Rather than purging elements of their personality from their writing in order to fit linear, homogenized, “White”-bread model demanded of them by academic institutions, “New Literacy” practices (Blogging, Manga, FanFics) give students the opportunity to write what they want to an audience that understands their intentions and contexts.  When given the option of engaging in a “New Literacy”, or to write an essay in language dubbed “universal” to hide its colonial underpinnings, the interesting choice seems clear. “New literacies” allow students to engage with writing in real time, to connect with a sociocultural reality in which they live, as opposed to, say, writing for an  audience in some distant future that just happens to be reading their Literacy Narrative essays defining modern slang, a situation as uninteresting as it is unimaginable.

And because this is a blog for future/current teachers, students be damned.  Academics want a voice beyond the language of the university as well.  According to Davies and Merchant’s “Blogging as New Literacy”, “to write a blog is a little like displaying a personal journal in a shop window, for friends and passers-by to read at their leisure.”  For academics, this new literacy practice can be an apt mediation point between work and life, especially if we consider that for most scholars, work is a large part of life.  The joy of the blogger is twofold: they break free of the shackles imposed on them by rigid editors and timeless-yet-linear literacy practices, and they get immediate gratification by hitting the “publish” button as soon as they finish writing.

Davies and Merchant claim that “Bloggers Have Feelings, Too,” and here blogging takes on perhaps its most interesting factor for me.  When I blog, or respond to a blog, I engage in a fresh and interesting conversation, and I’m allowed to say things like “students be damned”.  For the first time in my academic career, as I’ve blogged I’ve been allowed to maintain some personality, even (wait for it…) a sense of humor, irony, or fun.  “New Literacy” practices let teachers shed the grey cloak of serious academia, allow them to kill the machine, to de-reify, to personify, to breathe life back into themselves while they still get to geek out on school.  Through “New Literacy”, in the face of all odds and in the eyes of our students and the world, we the teachers are allowed to become human again.