Mark Warschauer
Professor of Education and Informatics
email: [email protected]
phone: (949) 824-2526
office: 3225 Education
twitter: http://twitter.com/markwarschauer
Professor of Education and Informatics
email: [email protected]
phone: (949) 824-2526
office: 3225 Education
twitter: http://twitter.com/markwarschauer
An edited version of this appears as the introductory chapter of:
Warschauer, M. (1999). Electronic literacies: Language, culture, and power in online education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Warschauer, M. (1999). Electronic literacies: Language, culture, and power in online education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Chapter 1
Introduction: Surveying the Terrain of Literacy
Introduction: Surveying the Terrain of Literacy
As what we mean by literacy changes (as it will), specific arguments about progress and decline will prove less instructive than an historical understanding of the process itself?an understanding of where our notions of being literate, or reading, and of writing come from, and how and why they are likely to evolve. Only such an understanding can provide an adequate basis for discussing the larger issues of language and public policy. To argue about the impact of computers on literacy otherwise is akin to designing buildings and bridges without a concern for the geological forces actively reshaping the earth's crust. As educators and citizens, we may not be able to alter the course of history by our own efforts, but like prudent architects and engineers we can survey the terrain, locating the bedrock that can provide the foundation of sound pedagogic practices and social structures.
Myron C. Tuman, Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age (1992, p. 22)
Literacy is frequently viewed as a set of context-neutral, value-free skills that can be imparted to individuals. A study of history, though, shows this model of literacy to be off the mark. Rather, being literate has always depended on mastering processes which are deemed valuable in particular societies, cultures, and contexts. Changes in the technologies available for reading and writing have an important impact on how we experience and think of literacy, but technology alone is not all-powerful. Rather, technological change intersects with other social, economic, cultural, and political factors to help determine how literacy is practiced.
A historical perspective can illustrate how concepts of literacy change. Looking back on the development of the printing press, Marshall McLuhan (1962) commented:
Had any of our current testers of media and various educational aids been available to the harassed sixteenth century administrator they would have been asked to find out whether the new teaching machine, the printed book, could do the full educational job. Could a portable, private instrument like the new book take the place of the book one made by hand and memorized as one made it? Could a book which could be read quickly and even silently take the place of a book read slowly? Could students trained by such printed books measure up to the skilled orators and disputants produced by manuscript means? (p. 145)
McLuhan's wry questions suggest some of the ways that notions of literacy began to change after the introduction of the printing press in Europe. In the pre-Gutenberg era, most thinkers did their composing orally and publicly as speeches and sermons (Olson, 1996). Writing in that era principally involved memorizing and transcribing oral speech or carefully and accurately copying classical manuscripts (McLuhan, 1962). A skilled writer thus had outstanding mnemonic and penmanship abilities. Reading was often done publicly, with an orator slowly reading a manuscript out loud. Whether done publicly or privately, though, the purpose of reading was to interpret a small number of classical and religious texts in order to achieve "a new consciousness of what a text could have meant or could mean to a putative reader" (Olson, 1994, p. 157, emphasis in original).
These notions of reading and writing started to change as early as the 12th century (Olson, 1994), but changed much more rapidly following the introduction of the printing press in the mid-15th century. In the new print era, scholarly writing came to be viewed as authorship of original material, and scholarly reading came to mean the gathering, comprehending, and making use of information from a variety of sources, thus laying the basis for modern scholarship (Eisenstein, 1979a; 1979b).
In analyzing this history, it is important to consider what changes were brought about by the introduction of new technology and what changes resulted from broader social, political, and economic transformation. Eisenstein's two-volume history (1979a; 1979b) makes a convincing case that the availability of printed material had a major impact on society in the 15th and 16th centuries, even when relatively few people knew how to read. Modern science was unleashed, as researchers were for the first time able to systematically build from previous knowledge which began to be available in print form (Ziman, 1968). Education was transformed as teachers and students were eased of the burden of slavish copying, and "students who took full advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends" (Eisenstein, 1979b, p. 689). The very format of the printed book?with tables, figures, footnotes, and indexes?contributed to new ways of categorizing and conceptualizing information (Eisenstein, 1979a; McLuhan, 1962).
At the same time, though, it should be clear that neither the printing press, nor any technology, operates as an autonomous agent bringing about change independent of broader social circumstances. As Eisenstein points out, movable type was developed in Asia earlier than in Europe but had much less impact. Its impact in Europe was dependent on other changes already underway there, including the emergence of a capitalist class, colonialism, and "a heightened sense of individuality and personality, of nationalism and secularism" (Murray, 1997, n.p.). Nor can the printing press be seen to have caused the spread of mass literacy in Europe, since that did not occur until several centuries later. It was the industrial revolution, not the industry of printing, which brought about mass print literacy and helped shape its current characteristics (see discussion in Tuman, 1992).
Notions of literacy have continued to change in the last 100 years. De Castell and Luke (1986) identify three distinct paradigms of school-based literacy in recent U.S. history, each highly dependent on the social, economic, and cultural norms of particular epochs. In the 19th century classical period, literacy was viewed as knowledge of literature and attention to rhetorical appropriateness. Literacy pedagogy involved rote learning, oral recitation, copying, and imitation of "correct speech and writing". And the literacy curriculum was based on exemplary texts such as the Bible, a narrow selection from Greek and Roman literature, and handwriting primers. This paradigm corresponded to the needs of an aristocratic social structure, in which, land, power, and knowledge was concentrated in few hands, and education involved obedience to tradition and power.
Following the mass industrialization of the early 20th century, a Deweyan progressive paradigm of literacy emerged as a "self-conscious attempt....to provide the skills, knowledge, and social attitudes required for urbanized commercial and industrial society" (de Castell & Luke, 1986, p. 103). In this paradigm, literacy was viewed as a form of self-expression. Literacy pedagogy involved teacher/pupil interaction and the "discovery method." The literacy curriculum included civics, adventure stories, and self-generated texts.
But the progressive model never fully took hold; rather it was in constant struggle with a more technocratic paradigm which eventually won out (Cuban, 1993). In this technocratic paradigm, literacy was viewed as the "survival skills" necessary to function in society. Literacy pedagogy involved programmed instruction, learning "packages" with teacher as facilitator, and "mastery learning" of a common set of objectives. And the literacy curriculum was based on decontextualized subskills of literate competence.
The technocratic paradigm which emerged in the 1940s both mimicked and served the needs of the dominant Fordist industrial structure of the era. Just as employees were required to carry out carefully programmed, narrowly-defined tasks in the workplace, students would be taught to do so in the schools. This approach won out not only because it would train students for the types of relationships and attitudes expected in the workplace, but also because it was believed to be the most advanced method of production?whether of cars or of functionally-literate citizens. Today though, as will be discussed below, this technocratic notion of literacy is itself being undermined as further changes in technology and society point to the need for new concepts of literacy.
From this brief historical sketch, we can conclude two points: (1) literacies are not context-free value-neutral sets of skills; rather, being literate "has always referred to having mastery over the processes by means of which culturally significant information is coded" (de Castell & Luke, 1986, p. 374); (2) technologies can contribute to altering conceptions of literacies, but the extent to which they do so depends on the broader social and economic contexts in which they emerge.
The Online Era
As we look toward the 21st century, what changes are now taking place in technology and in society that are affecting notions of literacy? As for technology, the most important current development affecting reading and writing is the development and spread of the Internet.
Started as a U.S. government experiment connecting a few defense agencies in 1969, the Internet has developed within three decades into a mass information and communications medium. Few doubt that within another three decades it will have reached into virtually every school and library and most homes in the United States and other developed countries, dramatically impacting business, education, and entertainment in the process. Developing countries are also placing emphasis, within their more limited capacity, on joining global information networks, and their ability to do so may be an important factor in their overall economic development (Carnoy, Castells, Cohen, & Cardoso, 1993).
In examining the technology of the Internet, it is worthwhile to distinguish between two related developments: (1) computer-mediated communication and (2) hypermedia and the World Wide Web.
Computer-Mediated Communication
Computer-mediated communication combines several features which together make it a powerful new medium of human interaction. Specifically, the online environment allows interaction which is text-based, many-to-many, and time- and place-independent.
Text-based interaction brings into one medium the two main functions of language: that it allows us to (1) interact communicatively and (2) "interpret experience by organizing it into meaning" (Halliday, 1993, p. 95). Historically, the interactive role has principally been fulfilled by speech, whereas the permanence of written texts has made them better vehicles for interpretation and reflection (Bruner, 1972). Writing could be accessed and analyzed again and again by a different people at different times. Print extended this advantage to limitless numbers of people around the globe. This is why the development of writing, and later print, are viewed as having fostered revolutions in the production of knowledge and cognition (Harnad, 1991). Unfortunately, though, "the real strength of writing...was purchased at the price of becoming a much less interactive medium than speech" (p. 42).
Yet it is precisely the intersection between interaction and reflection which is of critical importance in cognition. Heath, in her classic ethnographic study of language use in three communities, points this out well, as she illustrates the way the middle-class townspeople use language to educate their children:
It is as though in the drama of life, townspeople parents freeze scenes and parts of scenes at certain points along the way. Within the single frame of a scene, they focus the child's attention on objects or events in the frame, sort out referents for the child to name, give the child ordered turns for sharing talk about this referent, and then narrate a description of the scene. Through their focused language, adults make the potential stimuli in the child's environment stand still for a cooperative examination and narration between parent and child. The child learns to focus attention on a preselected referent, masters the relationships between the signifier and the signified, develops turn-taking skills in a focused conversation on the referent, and is subsequently expected to listen to, benefit from, and eventually to create narratives placing the referent in different contextual situations (Heath, 1983, p. 351).
A rereading of this paragraph gives a glimpse of why computer-mediated communication is considered to be a potential intellectual amplifier (Harasim, 1990; Harnad, 1991). For the first time in history (other than letters, which were much slower), human interaction now takes place in a text-based form?what's more, a computer-mediated form that is easily transmitted, stored, archived, re-evaluated, edited, and rewritten. The opportunities to freeze a single frame and focus attention on it are thus multiplied greatly. Individuals' own interactions can now become a basis for epistemic engagement. The historical divide between speech and writing has been overcome with the interactional and reflective aspects of language merged in a single medium. It is precisely this feature, the combination of writing and speech, which led one prominent cognitive scientist to describe the Internet as bringing about "the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge," on a par with the "three prior revolutions in the evolution of human communication and cognition: language, writing and print" (Harnad, 1991, p. 39).
The advantages of text-based interaction increase when they are combined with many-to-many communication. This refers to the fact that any participant in a discussion can communicate to all the other participants in the discussion. Combined with the time- and place-independent attributes of electronic mail (e-mail), this creates an unparalleled opportunity for grassroots global interaction. Indeed, even Theodore Roszak (1994), one of new technology's harshest critics, concedes that:
Computer networks are in many ways a unique form of communication....There is no other way in which a great number of people over an area as large as the world's telephone system can exchange ideas in so unstructured a way at all hours of the day and night, and even preserve a transcript in the form of hard copy (p. 169).
Many different forms have been devised for carrying out computer-mediated communication, including e-mail, bulletin boards, and various kinds of conferencing systems. Probably the most important distinction is between forms that are asynchronous, such as e-mail, and forms that are synchronous ("real-time"), such as chat groups. This book will look at the uses of both in the classroom.
None of the above discussion is meant to imply that computer-mediated communication automatically has any particular impact on its users. As Roszak points out, computer networks can be used for hateful propagandizing or insipid chat as easily as they can be used for collaborative development of knowledge. The advantages and disadvantages of using e-mail and other new communications media depend in large part on the way that they are used, as will be discussed at length in this volume. Nevertheless, the features of this new medium are quite powerful, which explains in part why the Internet has been such a fast-growing technology.
Hypermedia and the World Wide Web
Computer-mediated communication alone could be expected to have a dramatic impact. However, users around the world can do more than send out messages to individuals or groups. They can also create multimedia documents that are linked together in a world wide database.
A hyperlinked database was first proposed by Vannevar Bush (1945), who saw in it the potential to manage the amount of scientific information which even then was starting to expand rapidly. Though Bush's particular proposal, which involved the use of microfilm, was never developed, his vision finally reached fruition in the 1980s and 1990s with the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Hypertext creates a very different way of storing and presenting information than earlier forms of writing, even if only within a single user's pages; pieces of texts are connected through associative links, rather than all included in a single linear document. George Landow (1992) and Jay David Bolter (Bolter, 1991) wrote and taught hypertext fiction years before the development of the World Wide Web. Landow and Bolter were thus working with individual hypertexts, which may have had a number of links to other work archived on the same computer but were not yet linked to computers around the world. Nevertheless, even in this more limited form, they found that the associative nature of hypertext helped create for their students a very different sense of the meaning of author, reader, narrative, and text. Without a single linearity imposed on the text, readers are forced to take a much more active role in aspects traditionally viewed as authoring, such as deciding in what order a story should proceed (Landow, 1992).
The impact of hypertext becomes more profound when a single computer's files are linked with other files around the world, as on the World Wide Web. First, the Web places an unprecedented amount of information at the hands of individual users all around the globe. Second, it makes any computer user around the world a potential international author, without having to go through the costly expense of printing and distributing information on paper. Third, the Web further complicates the process of both writing and reading by allowing the author to make links (and the reader to thus pursue links) to any other work created anywhere in the world on the Web. The Web can thus be expected to have a deep impact not only on how we gather and share information, but also how we conceptualize reading and writing (Burbules & Callister, 1996; Gibson, 1996; Tuman, 1992).
Finally, and worthy of consideration as a revolutionary development in its own right, is the fact that hypertext systems such as the Web allow for the inclusion not only of texts, but also of graphics, sound files, and full-motion video. While print also has some graphical features, the ability to include a broad range of media is greatly expanded on the Web, thus potentially challenging the textual emphasis of print literacy. The emphasis on multimedia is not a new development but stems from a century of changes in mass media, including the invention and diffusion of radio, film, and television, which has drastically altered patterns of information exchange and entertainment in the 20th century. The turn to audiovisual media has also greatly influenced education, not so much in schools itself (Cuban, 1986) but in the types of applied educational training which take place in business, government, and the military (Lanham, 1993). Though the development of multimedia has no doubt influenced print media (indeed, one need look no further than the visual emphases of magazines and newspapers ranging from Wired to USA Today), it is in the computer-based multimedia on CD-ROMs and on the World Wide Web that the integration of text and audiovisual material is most complete, with the processes of reading and writing transformed into multimedia interpretation and authoring. Whether this development toward multimedia communication should be welcomed or abhorred will be discussed later in this chapter and throughout the book.
These many features of computer-mediated communication and the World Wide Web combine to potentially transform our notions of reading and writing. Indeed, already in the U.S. and other developed countries, the vast majority of writing in academia, business, and government takes place at a computer screen, and much of that writing is posted via computer rather than ever printed on paper. An increasing proportion of reading is done at the screen as well, including e-mail, Web browsing, and other forms of Internet use. The screen has not yet supplanted the page, but it has already joined it as an important medium of literate activity in modern society.
However, as discussed earlier, technological developments alone cannot totally account for changing conceptions of literacy. Rather, we must also take into account the broader social, economic, and political context. What changes are taking place in society that help shape the emergence of new screen-based literacies?
The Age of Information and the Network Society
Just as the Gutenberg era achieved its maximum impact only in the context of an industrial revolution, the online era is also being shaped by a new industrial revolution. Whereas the first industrial revolution was based on the harnessing of steam power, the newest industrial revolution is based on the harnessing of information, knowledge, and networks. This current information-based revolution, which began in the post-war period and is accelerating today, is viewed by many as bringing about a new postmodern world based on radically different production methods and accompanying changes in lifestyle.
There is broad consensus of political economists (e.g., Carnoy, et al., 1993; Castells, 1996; Reich, 1991; Rifkin, 1995), management specialists (e.g., Senge, 1991), post-modern theorists (e.g, Lyotard, 1984), and critical literacy scholars (e.g.,Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996; New London Group, 1996) on the main features of the informational revolution. First, productivity and economic growth are "increasingly dependent upon the application of science and technology, as well as upon the quality of information and management, in the process of production, consumption, distribution, and trade" (Carnoy, et al., 1993, p. 2). This is in contrast to the "pre-information" era, when advanced economies increased their productivity due principally to the amount of capital or labor added to the productive process. Second, in advanced capitalist countries there has been a shift from material production to information-processing activities; this entails not only a shift from manufacturing to service, but a shift within the service sector from non-information activities (e.g., cleaning floors) to information-processing activities (e.g., computer-software writing Castells, 1996, p. 17).
Third, there has been a shift from the standardized mass production and vertically-integrated large-scale organization of the Fordist era to flexible customized production and horizontal networks of economic units. In order to be able to develop, interpret and make use of new information and knowledge as quickly and as flexibly as possible, new "post-Fordist" management techniques are used which emphasize a flattened hierarchy, multiskilled labor, team-based work, and just-in-time production and distribution (Castells, 1993; Gee, et al., 1996; Reich, 1991.) Fourth, the new economy is a global one, in which capital, production, management, labor, markets, technology, and information are organized across national boundaries (Reich, 1991). Finally, all of the above is direct dependent on ongoing revolutions in science and technology, especially in the development of information technologies and telecommunications (Castells, 1993).
An example of the nature and impact of the informational revolution is seen in the automobile industry. In 1977, it took about 35 person-hours of labor to assemble an automobile in the United States. New Japanese production techniques, based on technological developments and multiskilled teamwork, brought that down to 19.1 hours by 1988, and it is estimated that Japanese automobiles assembled in the United States will require 8 person-hours of labor by the end of the 1990s (Reich, 1991). Just-in-time production and distribution techniques allow car manufacturers to save money on inventory and warehousing, and customized, flexible global production and distribution have given Japanese companies a big advantage over slower, more cumbersome U.S. companies (though U.S. companies are now catching up). In the future, new scientific developments are expected to dramatically reduce the weight and thus engine size of cars, while increased computing power will make combustion and driving more intelligent, to the point where the value of a car will be better understood by seeing it as "chip with wheels" rather than wheels with chips (Kelly, 1997, p. 194). And the ability to competitively design, manufacture, market, and distribute such a product internationally will be, and already is, dependent on modern telecommunications, with executives, designers, managers, and sales people around the world consulting, collaborating, communicating, and sharing information via computer networks.
Manuel Castells (1996) analyzes in depth what he calls the new informational mode of development and its impact on everything from media to culture to architecture to warfare. Castells concludes that the same network-based structural changes occurring in the world economy are emerging in cultural and social spheres as well, resulting in what he terms a network society:
Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalization, and decentralized concentration; for work, workers, and firms based on flexibility, and adaptability; for a culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction; for a polity geared towards the instant processing of new values and public moods; and for a social organization aiming at the supersession of space and the annihilation of time. Yet the network morphology is also a source of dramatic reorganization of power relationships (p. 470-471).
Just what that reorganization of power relationships may be will be discussed at the end of this chapter, as the final and perhaps most important issue I will explore regarding the impact of the informational on the development of new literacies.
Electronic Literacies: Issues and Challenges
The development of new communications technologies described earlier, in the context of the broader economic and social changes described above, set the stage for a major and rapid paradigm shift in notions of literacy. Whereas it took several hundred years after the Gutenberg revolution before large numbers of people had access to printed works (Eisenstein, 1979a), tens of millions of people have achieved access to the Internet in only a matter of decades. As of July 1997 the Internet connected 19.5 million host computers worldwide (Network Wizards, 1997) and an estimated 50 million users. This represented a 52% growth in Internet hosts over the previous 12 months, indicating that the Internet continues to expand at a rapid rate.
While there is little doubt that electronic literacies are going to become increasingly prominent in the coming years, there are several major controversies surrounding the development of these literacies. I will examine three contentious issues: (1) the nature of electronic literacies (2) electronic literacies and school reform; and (3) electronic literacies and (in)equality.
The Nature of Electronic Literacies
Scholars of new media are equally divided as to whether reading and writing on the screen is to be celebrated or abhorred. On the one hand, writers such as Richard Lanham (1993), Jay David Bolter (1991), and George Landow (1992) are celebratory of new electronic literacies, claiming that they represent much fuller and richer ways to present and access information. According to these scholars, the de-centered, multimedia character of new electronic media facilitates reading and writing processes which are more democratic, learner-centered, holistic, and natural than the processes involved in working with pre-computer, linear texts (Bolter, 1991; Lanham, 1993). In their view, hypertext facilitates a critical and dynamic approach to literacy which is an extension of the best traditions of the print world and finally fulfills the visions of critical literacy to "reconfigure" the text, author, and reader (Landow, 1992).
The same future that tantalizes Landow is terrifying to media critics such as Theodore Roszak (1994), Neil Postman (1993; 1995), Clifford Stoll (1995), Stephen Talbott (1995), and Sven Birkets (1994). These scholars see net-based reading and writing as fulfilling not the best dreams of critical theory but the worst nightmares of television, with readers "surfing" through catchy but vacuous material, never pausing long enough to read something from start to finish, much less critically analyze it. And writing, from such a perspective, would be reduced to searching for the snazziest graphics, rather than attending to serious argument.
There are some who see positive potential in new communications media, but just don't like the current manifestations, such as hypertext author Michael Joyce (in press), who wrote that "The World Wide Web offers a wasteland worse than any we imagined TV could offer" (n.p.). Others, though, criticize both the prospects of hypertext as well as its current reality. Sven Birkets (1994) argues that multimedia computing, following on the heels of other media such as television, will destroy young people's ability for serious, reflective reading. To the point that point that hypertext diminishes the elevated role of the author (see Landow, (1992), Birkets responds that
This "domination by the author" has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another. The premise behind the textual interchange is that the author possesses wisdom, an insight, a way of looking at experience, that the reader wants. A change in this relation is therefore not superficial. Once a reader is enabled to collaborate, participate, or in any way engage the text as an empowered player who has some say in the outcome of the game, the core assumptions of reading are called into question. The imagination is liberated from the constraint of being guided at every step by the author. Necessity is dethroned and arbitrariness is installed in its place.
Among the changes Birkets fears electronic postmodernity will bring about include language erosion, a flattening of historical perspectives, and a shattered faith in institutions and grand explanatory narratives:
My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; turned from depth?from the unfathomable mystery?and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web (p. 228).
Writing historian and hypertext author Jay David Bolter (1991) anticipates such critiques, and answers them by placing new ways of writing squarely within the realm of broader social changes.
Our culture is itself a vast writing space, a complex of symbolic structures. Just as we write our minds, we can say that we write the culture in which we live. And just as our culture is moving from the printed book to the computer, it is also in the final stages of the transition from a hierarchical social order to what we might call a "network culture."...Our culture of interconnections both reflects and is reflected in our new technology of writing. With all these transitions, the making and breaking of social links, people are beginning to function as elements in a hypertextual network of affiliations. Our whole society is taking on the provisional character of a hypertext (p. 232-233)
Bolter admits that reading will change dramatically, but feels that this will serve the new society well:
The computer is an ideal writing space for our networked society, because it permits every form of reading and writing from the most passive to the most active. A large group of users (perhaps the largest) will use the resources of the machine to shop, read the weather report, and play fantastic video games under the rubric of virtual reality. There will be a large market for the electronic equivalents of how-to books and interactive romances, science fiction, and the other genres. Small groups will read and write "serious" interactive fiction and non-fiction. Tiny networks of scholars will conduct esoteric studies in ancient and modern literature and languages. Hundreds or thousands of different interest groups from fundamentalist religion to space exploration will publish and read each other's messages and hypertexts?on commercial, academic, or governmental communication networks. Government and business will produce electronic documents by the billions....In the world of electronic writing, there will be no texts that everyone must read. There will only be texts that more or fewer readers choose to examine in more or less detail. The idea of the great, inescapable book belongs to the age of print that is now passing (p. 238/240).
Go to the second half of this chapter
Myron C. Tuman, Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age (1992, p. 22)
Literacy is frequently viewed as a set of context-neutral, value-free skills that can be imparted to individuals. A study of history, though, shows this model of literacy to be off the mark. Rather, being literate has always depended on mastering processes which are deemed valuable in particular societies, cultures, and contexts. Changes in the technologies available for reading and writing have an important impact on how we experience and think of literacy, but technology alone is not all-powerful. Rather, technological change intersects with other social, economic, cultural, and political factors to help determine how literacy is practiced.
A historical perspective can illustrate how concepts of literacy change. Looking back on the development of the printing press, Marshall McLuhan (1962) commented:
Had any of our current testers of media and various educational aids been available to the harassed sixteenth century administrator they would have been asked to find out whether the new teaching machine, the printed book, could do the full educational job. Could a portable, private instrument like the new book take the place of the book one made by hand and memorized as one made it? Could a book which could be read quickly and even silently take the place of a book read slowly? Could students trained by such printed books measure up to the skilled orators and disputants produced by manuscript means? (p. 145)
McLuhan's wry questions suggest some of the ways that notions of literacy began to change after the introduction of the printing press in Europe. In the pre-Gutenberg era, most thinkers did their composing orally and publicly as speeches and sermons (Olson, 1996). Writing in that era principally involved memorizing and transcribing oral speech or carefully and accurately copying classical manuscripts (McLuhan, 1962). A skilled writer thus had outstanding mnemonic and penmanship abilities. Reading was often done publicly, with an orator slowly reading a manuscript out loud. Whether done publicly or privately, though, the purpose of reading was to interpret a small number of classical and religious texts in order to achieve "a new consciousness of what a text could have meant or could mean to a putative reader" (Olson, 1994, p. 157, emphasis in original).
These notions of reading and writing started to change as early as the 12th century (Olson, 1994), but changed much more rapidly following the introduction of the printing press in the mid-15th century. In the new print era, scholarly writing came to be viewed as authorship of original material, and scholarly reading came to mean the gathering, comprehending, and making use of information from a variety of sources, thus laying the basis for modern scholarship (Eisenstein, 1979a; 1979b).
In analyzing this history, it is important to consider what changes were brought about by the introduction of new technology and what changes resulted from broader social, political, and economic transformation. Eisenstein's two-volume history (1979a; 1979b) makes a convincing case that the availability of printed material had a major impact on society in the 15th and 16th centuries, even when relatively few people knew how to read. Modern science was unleashed, as researchers were for the first time able to systematically build from previous knowledge which began to be available in print form (Ziman, 1968). Education was transformed as teachers and students were eased of the burden of slavish copying, and "students who took full advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends" (Eisenstein, 1979b, p. 689). The very format of the printed book?with tables, figures, footnotes, and indexes?contributed to new ways of categorizing and conceptualizing information (Eisenstein, 1979a; McLuhan, 1962).
At the same time, though, it should be clear that neither the printing press, nor any technology, operates as an autonomous agent bringing about change independent of broader social circumstances. As Eisenstein points out, movable type was developed in Asia earlier than in Europe but had much less impact. Its impact in Europe was dependent on other changes already underway there, including the emergence of a capitalist class, colonialism, and "a heightened sense of individuality and personality, of nationalism and secularism" (Murray, 1997, n.p.). Nor can the printing press be seen to have caused the spread of mass literacy in Europe, since that did not occur until several centuries later. It was the industrial revolution, not the industry of printing, which brought about mass print literacy and helped shape its current characteristics (see discussion in Tuman, 1992).
Notions of literacy have continued to change in the last 100 years. De Castell and Luke (1986) identify three distinct paradigms of school-based literacy in recent U.S. history, each highly dependent on the social, economic, and cultural norms of particular epochs. In the 19th century classical period, literacy was viewed as knowledge of literature and attention to rhetorical appropriateness. Literacy pedagogy involved rote learning, oral recitation, copying, and imitation of "correct speech and writing". And the literacy curriculum was based on exemplary texts such as the Bible, a narrow selection from Greek and Roman literature, and handwriting primers. This paradigm corresponded to the needs of an aristocratic social structure, in which, land, power, and knowledge was concentrated in few hands, and education involved obedience to tradition and power.
Following the mass industrialization of the early 20th century, a Deweyan progressive paradigm of literacy emerged as a "self-conscious attempt....to provide the skills, knowledge, and social attitudes required for urbanized commercial and industrial society" (de Castell & Luke, 1986, p. 103). In this paradigm, literacy was viewed as a form of self-expression. Literacy pedagogy involved teacher/pupil interaction and the "discovery method." The literacy curriculum included civics, adventure stories, and self-generated texts.
But the progressive model never fully took hold; rather it was in constant struggle with a more technocratic paradigm which eventually won out (Cuban, 1993). In this technocratic paradigm, literacy was viewed as the "survival skills" necessary to function in society. Literacy pedagogy involved programmed instruction, learning "packages" with teacher as facilitator, and "mastery learning" of a common set of objectives. And the literacy curriculum was based on decontextualized subskills of literate competence.
The technocratic paradigm which emerged in the 1940s both mimicked and served the needs of the dominant Fordist industrial structure of the era. Just as employees were required to carry out carefully programmed, narrowly-defined tasks in the workplace, students would be taught to do so in the schools. This approach won out not only because it would train students for the types of relationships and attitudes expected in the workplace, but also because it was believed to be the most advanced method of production?whether of cars or of functionally-literate citizens. Today though, as will be discussed below, this technocratic notion of literacy is itself being undermined as further changes in technology and society point to the need for new concepts of literacy.
From this brief historical sketch, we can conclude two points: (1) literacies are not context-free value-neutral sets of skills; rather, being literate "has always referred to having mastery over the processes by means of which culturally significant information is coded" (de Castell & Luke, 1986, p. 374); (2) technologies can contribute to altering conceptions of literacies, but the extent to which they do so depends on the broader social and economic contexts in which they emerge.
The Online Era
As we look toward the 21st century, what changes are now taking place in technology and in society that are affecting notions of literacy? As for technology, the most important current development affecting reading and writing is the development and spread of the Internet.
Started as a U.S. government experiment connecting a few defense agencies in 1969, the Internet has developed within three decades into a mass information and communications medium. Few doubt that within another three decades it will have reached into virtually every school and library and most homes in the United States and other developed countries, dramatically impacting business, education, and entertainment in the process. Developing countries are also placing emphasis, within their more limited capacity, on joining global information networks, and their ability to do so may be an important factor in their overall economic development (Carnoy, Castells, Cohen, & Cardoso, 1993).
In examining the technology of the Internet, it is worthwhile to distinguish between two related developments: (1) computer-mediated communication and (2) hypermedia and the World Wide Web.
Computer-Mediated Communication
Computer-mediated communication combines several features which together make it a powerful new medium of human interaction. Specifically, the online environment allows interaction which is text-based, many-to-many, and time- and place-independent.
Text-based interaction brings into one medium the two main functions of language: that it allows us to (1) interact communicatively and (2) "interpret experience by organizing it into meaning" (Halliday, 1993, p. 95). Historically, the interactive role has principally been fulfilled by speech, whereas the permanence of written texts has made them better vehicles for interpretation and reflection (Bruner, 1972). Writing could be accessed and analyzed again and again by a different people at different times. Print extended this advantage to limitless numbers of people around the globe. This is why the development of writing, and later print, are viewed as having fostered revolutions in the production of knowledge and cognition (Harnad, 1991). Unfortunately, though, "the real strength of writing...was purchased at the price of becoming a much less interactive medium than speech" (p. 42).
Yet it is precisely the intersection between interaction and reflection which is of critical importance in cognition. Heath, in her classic ethnographic study of language use in three communities, points this out well, as she illustrates the way the middle-class townspeople use language to educate their children:
It is as though in the drama of life, townspeople parents freeze scenes and parts of scenes at certain points along the way. Within the single frame of a scene, they focus the child's attention on objects or events in the frame, sort out referents for the child to name, give the child ordered turns for sharing talk about this referent, and then narrate a description of the scene. Through their focused language, adults make the potential stimuli in the child's environment stand still for a cooperative examination and narration between parent and child. The child learns to focus attention on a preselected referent, masters the relationships between the signifier and the signified, develops turn-taking skills in a focused conversation on the referent, and is subsequently expected to listen to, benefit from, and eventually to create narratives placing the referent in different contextual situations (Heath, 1983, p. 351).
A rereading of this paragraph gives a glimpse of why computer-mediated communication is considered to be a potential intellectual amplifier (Harasim, 1990; Harnad, 1991). For the first time in history (other than letters, which were much slower), human interaction now takes place in a text-based form?what's more, a computer-mediated form that is easily transmitted, stored, archived, re-evaluated, edited, and rewritten. The opportunities to freeze a single frame and focus attention on it are thus multiplied greatly. Individuals' own interactions can now become a basis for epistemic engagement. The historical divide between speech and writing has been overcome with the interactional and reflective aspects of language merged in a single medium. It is precisely this feature, the combination of writing and speech, which led one prominent cognitive scientist to describe the Internet as bringing about "the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge," on a par with the "three prior revolutions in the evolution of human communication and cognition: language, writing and print" (Harnad, 1991, p. 39).
The advantages of text-based interaction increase when they are combined with many-to-many communication. This refers to the fact that any participant in a discussion can communicate to all the other participants in the discussion. Combined with the time- and place-independent attributes of electronic mail (e-mail), this creates an unparalleled opportunity for grassroots global interaction. Indeed, even Theodore Roszak (1994), one of new technology's harshest critics, concedes that:
Computer networks are in many ways a unique form of communication....There is no other way in which a great number of people over an area as large as the world's telephone system can exchange ideas in so unstructured a way at all hours of the day and night, and even preserve a transcript in the form of hard copy (p. 169).
Many different forms have been devised for carrying out computer-mediated communication, including e-mail, bulletin boards, and various kinds of conferencing systems. Probably the most important distinction is between forms that are asynchronous, such as e-mail, and forms that are synchronous ("real-time"), such as chat groups. This book will look at the uses of both in the classroom.
None of the above discussion is meant to imply that computer-mediated communication automatically has any particular impact on its users. As Roszak points out, computer networks can be used for hateful propagandizing or insipid chat as easily as they can be used for collaborative development of knowledge. The advantages and disadvantages of using e-mail and other new communications media depend in large part on the way that they are used, as will be discussed at length in this volume. Nevertheless, the features of this new medium are quite powerful, which explains in part why the Internet has been such a fast-growing technology.
Hypermedia and the World Wide Web
Computer-mediated communication alone could be expected to have a dramatic impact. However, users around the world can do more than send out messages to individuals or groups. They can also create multimedia documents that are linked together in a world wide database.
A hyperlinked database was first proposed by Vannevar Bush (1945), who saw in it the potential to manage the amount of scientific information which even then was starting to expand rapidly. Though Bush's particular proposal, which involved the use of microfilm, was never developed, his vision finally reached fruition in the 1980s and 1990s with the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Hypertext creates a very different way of storing and presenting information than earlier forms of writing, even if only within a single user's pages; pieces of texts are connected through associative links, rather than all included in a single linear document. George Landow (1992) and Jay David Bolter (Bolter, 1991) wrote and taught hypertext fiction years before the development of the World Wide Web. Landow and Bolter were thus working with individual hypertexts, which may have had a number of links to other work archived on the same computer but were not yet linked to computers around the world. Nevertheless, even in this more limited form, they found that the associative nature of hypertext helped create for their students a very different sense of the meaning of author, reader, narrative, and text. Without a single linearity imposed on the text, readers are forced to take a much more active role in aspects traditionally viewed as authoring, such as deciding in what order a story should proceed (Landow, 1992).
The impact of hypertext becomes more profound when a single computer's files are linked with other files around the world, as on the World Wide Web. First, the Web places an unprecedented amount of information at the hands of individual users all around the globe. Second, it makes any computer user around the world a potential international author, without having to go through the costly expense of printing and distributing information on paper. Third, the Web further complicates the process of both writing and reading by allowing the author to make links (and the reader to thus pursue links) to any other work created anywhere in the world on the Web. The Web can thus be expected to have a deep impact not only on how we gather and share information, but also how we conceptualize reading and writing (Burbules & Callister, 1996; Gibson, 1996; Tuman, 1992).
Finally, and worthy of consideration as a revolutionary development in its own right, is the fact that hypertext systems such as the Web allow for the inclusion not only of texts, but also of graphics, sound files, and full-motion video. While print also has some graphical features, the ability to include a broad range of media is greatly expanded on the Web, thus potentially challenging the textual emphasis of print literacy. The emphasis on multimedia is not a new development but stems from a century of changes in mass media, including the invention and diffusion of radio, film, and television, which has drastically altered patterns of information exchange and entertainment in the 20th century. The turn to audiovisual media has also greatly influenced education, not so much in schools itself (Cuban, 1986) but in the types of applied educational training which take place in business, government, and the military (Lanham, 1993). Though the development of multimedia has no doubt influenced print media (indeed, one need look no further than the visual emphases of magazines and newspapers ranging from Wired to USA Today), it is in the computer-based multimedia on CD-ROMs and on the World Wide Web that the integration of text and audiovisual material is most complete, with the processes of reading and writing transformed into multimedia interpretation and authoring. Whether this development toward multimedia communication should be welcomed or abhorred will be discussed later in this chapter and throughout the book.
These many features of computer-mediated communication and the World Wide Web combine to potentially transform our notions of reading and writing. Indeed, already in the U.S. and other developed countries, the vast majority of writing in academia, business, and government takes place at a computer screen, and much of that writing is posted via computer rather than ever printed on paper. An increasing proportion of reading is done at the screen as well, including e-mail, Web browsing, and other forms of Internet use. The screen has not yet supplanted the page, but it has already joined it as an important medium of literate activity in modern society.
However, as discussed earlier, technological developments alone cannot totally account for changing conceptions of literacy. Rather, we must also take into account the broader social, economic, and political context. What changes are taking place in society that help shape the emergence of new screen-based literacies?
The Age of Information and the Network Society
Just as the Gutenberg era achieved its maximum impact only in the context of an industrial revolution, the online era is also being shaped by a new industrial revolution. Whereas the first industrial revolution was based on the harnessing of steam power, the newest industrial revolution is based on the harnessing of information, knowledge, and networks. This current information-based revolution, which began in the post-war period and is accelerating today, is viewed by many as bringing about a new postmodern world based on radically different production methods and accompanying changes in lifestyle.
There is broad consensus of political economists (e.g., Carnoy, et al., 1993; Castells, 1996; Reich, 1991; Rifkin, 1995), management specialists (e.g., Senge, 1991), post-modern theorists (e.g, Lyotard, 1984), and critical literacy scholars (e.g.,Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996; New London Group, 1996) on the main features of the informational revolution. First, productivity and economic growth are "increasingly dependent upon the application of science and technology, as well as upon the quality of information and management, in the process of production, consumption, distribution, and trade" (Carnoy, et al., 1993, p. 2). This is in contrast to the "pre-information" era, when advanced economies increased their productivity due principally to the amount of capital or labor added to the productive process. Second, in advanced capitalist countries there has been a shift from material production to information-processing activities; this entails not only a shift from manufacturing to service, but a shift within the service sector from non-information activities (e.g., cleaning floors) to information-processing activities (e.g., computer-software writing Castells, 1996, p. 17).
Third, there has been a shift from the standardized mass production and vertically-integrated large-scale organization of the Fordist era to flexible customized production and horizontal networks of economic units. In order to be able to develop, interpret and make use of new information and knowledge as quickly and as flexibly as possible, new "post-Fordist" management techniques are used which emphasize a flattened hierarchy, multiskilled labor, team-based work, and just-in-time production and distribution (Castells, 1993; Gee, et al., 1996; Reich, 1991.) Fourth, the new economy is a global one, in which capital, production, management, labor, markets, technology, and information are organized across national boundaries (Reich, 1991). Finally, all of the above is direct dependent on ongoing revolutions in science and technology, especially in the development of information technologies and telecommunications (Castells, 1993).
An example of the nature and impact of the informational revolution is seen in the automobile industry. In 1977, it took about 35 person-hours of labor to assemble an automobile in the United States. New Japanese production techniques, based on technological developments and multiskilled teamwork, brought that down to 19.1 hours by 1988, and it is estimated that Japanese automobiles assembled in the United States will require 8 person-hours of labor by the end of the 1990s (Reich, 1991). Just-in-time production and distribution techniques allow car manufacturers to save money on inventory and warehousing, and customized, flexible global production and distribution have given Japanese companies a big advantage over slower, more cumbersome U.S. companies (though U.S. companies are now catching up). In the future, new scientific developments are expected to dramatically reduce the weight and thus engine size of cars, while increased computing power will make combustion and driving more intelligent, to the point where the value of a car will be better understood by seeing it as "chip with wheels" rather than wheels with chips (Kelly, 1997, p. 194). And the ability to competitively design, manufacture, market, and distribute such a product internationally will be, and already is, dependent on modern telecommunications, with executives, designers, managers, and sales people around the world consulting, collaborating, communicating, and sharing information via computer networks.
Manuel Castells (1996) analyzes in depth what he calls the new informational mode of development and its impact on everything from media to culture to architecture to warfare. Castells concludes that the same network-based structural changes occurring in the world economy are emerging in cultural and social spheres as well, resulting in what he terms a network society:
Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalization, and decentralized concentration; for work, workers, and firms based on flexibility, and adaptability; for a culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction; for a polity geared towards the instant processing of new values and public moods; and for a social organization aiming at the supersession of space and the annihilation of time. Yet the network morphology is also a source of dramatic reorganization of power relationships (p. 470-471).
Just what that reorganization of power relationships may be will be discussed at the end of this chapter, as the final and perhaps most important issue I will explore regarding the impact of the informational on the development of new literacies.
Electronic Literacies: Issues and Challenges
The development of new communications technologies described earlier, in the context of the broader economic and social changes described above, set the stage for a major and rapid paradigm shift in notions of literacy. Whereas it took several hundred years after the Gutenberg revolution before large numbers of people had access to printed works (Eisenstein, 1979a), tens of millions of people have achieved access to the Internet in only a matter of decades. As of July 1997 the Internet connected 19.5 million host computers worldwide (Network Wizards, 1997) and an estimated 50 million users. This represented a 52% growth in Internet hosts over the previous 12 months, indicating that the Internet continues to expand at a rapid rate.
While there is little doubt that electronic literacies are going to become increasingly prominent in the coming years, there are several major controversies surrounding the development of these literacies. I will examine three contentious issues: (1) the nature of electronic literacies (2) electronic literacies and school reform; and (3) electronic literacies and (in)equality.
The Nature of Electronic Literacies
Scholars of new media are equally divided as to whether reading and writing on the screen is to be celebrated or abhorred. On the one hand, writers such as Richard Lanham (1993), Jay David Bolter (1991), and George Landow (1992) are celebratory of new electronic literacies, claiming that they represent much fuller and richer ways to present and access information. According to these scholars, the de-centered, multimedia character of new electronic media facilitates reading and writing processes which are more democratic, learner-centered, holistic, and natural than the processes involved in working with pre-computer, linear texts (Bolter, 1991; Lanham, 1993). In their view, hypertext facilitates a critical and dynamic approach to literacy which is an extension of the best traditions of the print world and finally fulfills the visions of critical literacy to "reconfigure" the text, author, and reader (Landow, 1992).
The same future that tantalizes Landow is terrifying to media critics such as Theodore Roszak (1994), Neil Postman (1993; 1995), Clifford Stoll (1995), Stephen Talbott (1995), and Sven Birkets (1994). These scholars see net-based reading and writing as fulfilling not the best dreams of critical theory but the worst nightmares of television, with readers "surfing" through catchy but vacuous material, never pausing long enough to read something from start to finish, much less critically analyze it. And writing, from such a perspective, would be reduced to searching for the snazziest graphics, rather than attending to serious argument.
There are some who see positive potential in new communications media, but just don't like the current manifestations, such as hypertext author Michael Joyce (in press), who wrote that "The World Wide Web offers a wasteland worse than any we imagined TV could offer" (n.p.). Others, though, criticize both the prospects of hypertext as well as its current reality. Sven Birkets (1994) argues that multimedia computing, following on the heels of other media such as television, will destroy young people's ability for serious, reflective reading. To the point that point that hypertext diminishes the elevated role of the author (see Landow, (1992), Birkets responds that
This "domination by the author" has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another. The premise behind the textual interchange is that the author possesses wisdom, an insight, a way of looking at experience, that the reader wants. A change in this relation is therefore not superficial. Once a reader is enabled to collaborate, participate, or in any way engage the text as an empowered player who has some say in the outcome of the game, the core assumptions of reading are called into question. The imagination is liberated from the constraint of being guided at every step by the author. Necessity is dethroned and arbitrariness is installed in its place.
Among the changes Birkets fears electronic postmodernity will bring about include language erosion, a flattening of historical perspectives, and a shattered faith in institutions and grand explanatory narratives:
My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; turned from depth?from the unfathomable mystery?and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web (p. 228).
Writing historian and hypertext author Jay David Bolter (1991) anticipates such critiques, and answers them by placing new ways of writing squarely within the realm of broader social changes.
Our culture is itself a vast writing space, a complex of symbolic structures. Just as we write our minds, we can say that we write the culture in which we live. And just as our culture is moving from the printed book to the computer, it is also in the final stages of the transition from a hierarchical social order to what we might call a "network culture."...Our culture of interconnections both reflects and is reflected in our new technology of writing. With all these transitions, the making and breaking of social links, people are beginning to function as elements in a hypertextual network of affiliations. Our whole society is taking on the provisional character of a hypertext (p. 232-233)
Bolter admits that reading will change dramatically, but feels that this will serve the new society well:
The computer is an ideal writing space for our networked society, because it permits every form of reading and writing from the most passive to the most active. A large group of users (perhaps the largest) will use the resources of the machine to shop, read the weather report, and play fantastic video games under the rubric of virtual reality. There will be a large market for the electronic equivalents of how-to books and interactive romances, science fiction, and the other genres. Small groups will read and write "serious" interactive fiction and non-fiction. Tiny networks of scholars will conduct esoteric studies in ancient and modern literature and languages. Hundreds or thousands of different interest groups from fundamentalist religion to space exploration will publish and read each other's messages and hypertexts?on commercial, academic, or governmental communication networks. Government and business will produce electronic documents by the billions....In the world of electronic writing, there will be no texts that everyone must read. There will only be texts that more or fewer readers choose to examine in more or less detail. The idea of the great, inescapable book belongs to the age of print that is now passing (p. 238/240).
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