Some thoughts on what we often mean when we talk about technological literacy
Today’s Inside Higher Ed‘s article “Technologically Illiterate Students” begins:
Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate’s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called “I Pee My Pants When I’m Drunk.” What is your first thought?
It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas — though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else — something that might be more relevant to the student’s qualifications.
“What it tells me,” Zvacek said, “is that the student is technologically illiterate.”
The piece then goes on to offer Zvacek’s definition of technological literacy:
“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”
The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”
On the one hand, I want to stand back and suggest that the issue raised in the anecdote isn’t about technological awareness but rhetorical awareness, about the construction of the self. And it is. At the same time, however, Zvacek is getting at something else. Zvacek is responding to the US Department of Education’s definition of technological literacy as knowing how to use a computer, and in doing so, she’s not alone.1
I want to push this issue farther though, push it beyond the concepts of computer literacy or technological literacy. In fact, I want to push us beyond the use of the word literacy itself for a whole host of reasons, first and foremost because literacy is, technically, about letters, about the written word, and that positions the issue squarely in a particular techno-cultural-noetic milieu.2
I was fumbling with this very subject when I wrote about technological literacy in The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage, which I wrote earlier this year as an example for students working on their own technological literacy collages. I’m unhappy with what I wrote there, unhappy, in fact, as I was writing it. The problem, I’ve realized, is that I fell into the trap I try to push students away from. I let the imperiousness of literacy muddle my thinking3 The issue, I so fumblingly hinted at in my technological literacy collage is not literacy of any sort but awareness rooted in orality-literacy studies and media ecology. Its the kind of awareness that Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong spent their careers trying to teach us.
As long as we keep rooting this issue in particular techno-cultural-noetic contexts, we’re going to keep fumbling along, never to get it right. The awareness I’m talking about here, and the awareness I think Susan Zvacek is getting at without realizing it, is rooted in an awareness of McLuhan’s dictum/maxim “The medium is the massage,” that “[a]ll media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”4 That is, McLuhan’s awareness of how media work as environments:
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a working knowledge of the way media work as environments. (26)
It can be hard, at first, to convince students that you’re actually talking about something relevant to their lives when you jump around from such topics as the difference between alphabets, syllabaries, and logograms; renaissance perspectivism and railroads; Homeric myth and encyclopedias; Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Absurdest theater, and the Fluxus Movement; John Cage and Charlotte Moorman, the TV-bra wearing cellist and performance artist. As McLuhan knew, you’ve got to pull the rug out from under their (our) feet before we can get beneath the surface and understand the deep structures. As I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere from time to time, focusing on surface, making the mistake of being too rooted in a particular techno-cultural-noetic perspective, leads us to focus on the wrong things. My go-to example here is the belief that oral poets must be illiterate. Early scholars of oral tradition too quickly jumped to this conclusion that oral poets must be illiterate because the oral poets they studied were illiterate, even while there was evidence to the contrary, and it mistaken notion was perpetuated for far too long.5 As Ong argued, writing is imperious. It clouds our perspective. We are so rooted in literacy and in print culture that we far too often fail to realize it’s not our natural noetic state or that it’s not inherently better than other noetic states. This is the reason why we use literacy as the metaphor for everything, and in doing so, we fail to recognize that when we think we’re talking about literacy we are sometimes actually talking about awareness of media as environments.
Ultimately, this is why I keep teaching The Medium is the Massage, why I keep returning to it semester after semester even as I resist becoming one of those teachers who always teaches the same thing semester after semester. A year ago, a student told me our university president walked by, saw the student reading The Medium is the Massage, and said, “People still teach that?” Fortunately, this particular student had gotten McLuhan’s message by that time and she was grooving on it big time. She had come to understand McLuhan’s message and its relevance to her 21st-century life. I keep teaching McLuhan because it is relevant to all our 21st-century lives and it will be relevant to the lives of our 30th-century ancestors.
Hmmm…Timothy Leary came up with the dictum “turn on, tune in, drop out” at McLuhan’s urging. (( In Fashbacks, Leary laments that people misinterpreted this as meaning “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity” rather than asking them to alter their consciousness so to live better.) In that spirit, let me offer a new dictum, one to keep in mind when we think we’re talking about literacy: Peal back, delve deep, be aware.
- For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, let me suggest Cindy Selfe’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention; Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives from the United States, and Stewart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age as three good starting points. [↩]
- See, for instance, Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Blinded By the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy for a Metaphor for Everything Else?” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. [↩]
- If you’re really curious as to what I mean by this, see Walter J. Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” (The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.). [↩]
- The Medium is the Massage, 26. [↩]
- Scholars of oral tradition, including such people as Albert Lord who was one of scholars who first promoted the error, have also worked to correct this perception. For a good, introductory text on this subject, see John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem. [↩]
Of Singularities and Orality-Literacy Studies; or OLS and Technological Determinism
I’ve never really been happy with my January 19, 2007 post on orality-literacy studies and technological determinism, and a couple of things I’ve read recently have made me want to return to the topic. I still think the distinction between strong and weak theories of technological determinism is important and help us understand why charges of technological determinism in orality-literacy studies all too often miss the mark. (That is, critics often fail to recognize a distinction between the models of weak and strong technological determinism, therefore assuming that accounts of technological development operate under the strong model. On the other hand, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the questions I ask about what is and is not technology and the distinctions we make between humans and animals, even when I wrote them, but that’s not what I want to address here. Rather, I want to consider orality-literacy studies and technological singularities.
I first started thinking I wanted to blog about this issue again while at MLA. As I usually do when traveling, I brought along some science fiction to read. Of late, I’ve been focusing on short story collections as their easier to dip in and out of (finish a story and you can set the collection aside and return to it months or even years later), and I’d picked up Charles Stross’ Toast, in large part because it has the short story “A Colder War,” which extrapolates Lovecraft’s Mythos into the Cold War.1 It wasn’t “A Colder War” or any of the stories, however, that got me to thinking about this post. Instead, it was the collection’s introduction, titled “After the Future Imploded.”
In it, Stross writes:
The sheer speed with which change swept over the twentieth century, bearing us all towards some unseen crescendo, was a tonic for the imagination. Science fiction wouldn’t have flourished in an earlier era—it took a time of change, when children growing up with horse-drawn carriages would fly around the world on jet engines, to make plausible the dreams of continuous progress that this genre is based on.
But the pace of change isn’t slackening. If anything, it’s accelerating, the coming century is going to destroy futures even faster than the last one created them. (9)
One of Stross’ points in this introduction, which I can’t quote since my book is about 1,000 miles away at the moment, is that cultures reach points in their development (singularities) at which there is no return without tearing the whole system down. (The interiorization of literacy, I’d argue, is one of those singularities, and so too the interiorization of numeracy.) We can move on from that point in history, but we can’t return to the pre-singularity state without apocalyptic consequences because the singularity radically reshapes the whole of the culture. A singularity means more than that, however.
Specific technological developments not only open us up to possible futures (and singularities), they also close down (implode, to use Stross’ term) other possible futures. Technologies, whether found or invented or physical or mental, come with specific affordances and constraints, and those affordances and constraints channel future development. You can fight them, resist them, hack them, and even abandon them, but those affordances and constraints mean that their (personal and cultural) interiorization does set you on specific paths, it sets limits on the possible futures you can have. And the interiorization of certain technologies—not all technologies mind you—are so complete in their reorganization of a culture that they invoke a singularity, a point of no return, a point where we can not conceive of a world without that technology without much difficulty.2
And that’s where technological determinism comes in. Because a technology’s affordances and constraints afford us certain possibilities and constrain other possibilities, they set us on certain paths, certain futures. Proponents of strong technological determinism look at the past and declare that Technology A meant that Future Y had to happen, that the future (our present) was inevitable. Proponents of weak technological determinism, however, recognize that we always have possibilities, but those possibilities are channeled/shaped/structured by other possibilities, that there is no one determined future but a set of possible futures made both possible and limited by the technologies we adopt. (Recognizing at the same time, of course, that these technologies are but one part of a much larger matrix of human culture and civilization.)
When someone like McLuhan or Ong describes what happened in the past to get us where we are now, they can appear to be engaging in a strong deterministic model because they don’t focus on the branches we could have followed but one the path we did follow.3 When we read someone who explains that X lead to Y, we need to recognize that this does not necessarily mean that they are arguing that X had to lead to Y (strong determinism), but that Y was one of the possible futures resulting from X and just happens to be part of the future we followed. Likewise, when providing accounts of technological development, we need to remember to not fall into the strong model fallacy, even when there really was only one possible future.
- “A Colder War” is not part of Stross’ Bob Howard-Laundry books, I should note because that’s what I thought it was going to be. I’d like to know for sure, but my guess is that “A Colder War” provided the genesis for the Bob Howard books in the same way Pratchett’s Strata provided a genesis for the Discworld series. Atrocity Archive, the first Bob Howard novel, got me hooked on Stross, and his novel Accelerando, which I read during Computers and Writing last year, sealed the deal. Accelerando‘s vision of a post-singularity future involving uploaded consciousnesses (including a group of California spiny lobsters); nanotech assemblers reconstructing and reconstructing, among other things, said uploaded consciousnesses; computronium; matrioshka brains; and routers from a long-past galactic empire circling brown dwarfs–all concepts I was familiar with–was so powerful and novel that I literally had weird dreams every night I read some of the book, so I finally decided to finish it off in a marathon read. [↩]
- Of course we can imagine a world without a specific technology, but only to a limited extent. To put it another way, how would the world be different without you? To simplify this thought experiment, let us consider one question: how would the future be different if Catherine Kassner had been placed in your Second Grade class rather than Mrs. Landcaster’s class because you didn’t exist? What social networks might have formed and not formed that year because of your absence from the school and Kassner’s presence in the one class rather than the other class? Might Tonya Jones and Kim Woo not have died on the night of Feb. 24, 1991 because they were at a wedding that night rather than driving home from that Iron Maiden/Anthrax/Public Enemy concert? You see, from the get go it’s not just the possibilities shut down by your absence that we have to take into account but the possibilities opened up by your absence as well, along with the possibilities those differences both open up and shut down, as well as the possibilities those possibilities open up and shut down, and so on. And therein resides the problem, how do you go about understanding all the possible effects, all the ripples and interconnections, one person or one event or one technology has in the vast ecology/network we call human culture? How do you take it all into account so that you can say that you actually understand what it means to not have that person, event, or technology? [↩]
- Terry Pratchett, in his Discworld series, refers to the “trousers of time,” which is an apt metaphor. When we look into the future, we look into the trousers of time from the waist end, thereby seeing multiple pants legs, but when we look into the past, we are looking into trousers of time from pants leg, giving us the illusion that there was only one possible path. [↩]
Musings on Ong’s Expansion of Secondary Orality
As I explain in a post at Notes from the Walter J. Ong Collection, I found a few more references to “secondary visualism” in Ong’s files. While both are of real interest, one of them, a one-page, single-spaced printout titled “Notanda for Informal Response” (written for the 1995 Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Convention session “Presences of the Word: Ong Studies for the 21st Century”), offers a radical rewrite of secondary orality as well:
Oral residue after writing and writing’s sequels. My PW, OL, &c.1 Very helpful: Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy.
Secondary orality (orality interacting with writing, print, and electronics): not only in the electronic age (to which I first applied the term, directly to radio and television) but also in the manuscript and print ages and postmodern deconstruction. Paul, close of 2 Thess.
In addition, secondary visualism of manuscript age, and much more of print age (exactly repeatable visual statement) and of electronic communication (graphics).
While Ong’s three documented references to “secondary visualism,” of which this is one, and his one documented reference to “secondary literacy” are of serious import in and of themselves (see this post for cites), I’m interested here in how this reference to secondary visualism helps contextualize his revision of secondary orality. A lot to think about here.
If I’m understanding this, oral residue is oral seepage into writing and secondary orality, which Ong used to define as “technologically powered, demanding the use of writing and other technologies in designing and manufacturing the machines which reproduce voice” (“The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong” 80)2 becomes orality shaped/influenced by writing, what Ong used to call textuality.
Here we find a return to the oralism-visualism interplay Ong was first exploring in his work on Ramus, with the oral and the visual running in complementary and parallel tracks. For instance, if we were to consider a medieval manuscript, a textual artifact from chirographic culture, while the verbal elements (i.e., the words on the page) would be some mix of oral residue and secondary orality, the visual elements of the page (including words and blocks of words as images) are aspects of secondary visualism.
Which leads me to ask, what is primary visualism? The natural world? Dance? Found art (as opposed to art made with tools)? Non-verbal face-to-face communication?
- The Presence of the Word and Orality and Literacy. [↩]
- Kleine, Michael, and Fredric G. Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Composition FORUM 7.2 (1996): 65-86. [↩]
Musings on Media Ecology and Grammar, Glamour, and Grammarye
While I’ve read the first half of Lance Strate‘s Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study in Communication Research Trends, I wanted to skim the whole book to think about it as a possible text if I decide to go with a media ecology theme for the special topics course. I like Lance’s various definitions of media ecology, and this passage from the book’s introduction stood out as something I wanted to blog:
From the standpoint of the trivium, Echoes and Reflections may be regarded as a grammar book, in that media ecology is concerned with the structures, rules, and biases governing languages, media, and technologies–governing the world as well as the word. (3)
It’s this notion of trying to understand how languages, media, and technologies function within that explains what I find so intellectually interesting about media ecology and its sub-field orality-literacy studies.
But I also like this passage for its positing Echoes and Reflections as a grammar book in the medieval sense of the term, in large part because I can’t think about grammar any more without thinking about Shippey’s discussion of grammar, grammarye, and glamour in both The Road to Middle Earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. This discussion is, in large part, a gloss on the curious passage in “Farmer Giles of Ham” in which the parson suggests that Giles take some rope with him as he goes looking for the dragon a second time. The passage from “Farmer Giles of Ham” reads:
at least the parson with his booklearning might have guessed it. Maybe he did. He was a grammarian, and could doubtless see further into the future than others.
This is one of Tolkien’s philological jokes, Shippey tells us. Well, joke isn’t the right word, but it’s Tolkien having some philological fun. Glamour is a corruption of grammar and is “paralleled in sense” by grammarye. Glamour is the ability to change shape for the purposes of deception, and grammarye is “occult learning, magic, necromancy.” To better make sense of this, I want to posit the notion of “natural” magic, the magic of faerie (to use a Tolkienian term), and formulaic, ritualistic, rule-bound magic one studies and may even learn from books. Grammarye would be of the later sort.
So, how does this all connect to Strate’s discussion of media ecology? Well, a grammar, in the medieval sense, is concerned with structures, rules, and biases. Its function is to make visible the invisible or hidden by providing the formulas and rules that govern a subject. (Consider, for instance, Innis’ study of biases, McLuhan’s laws of media, and Ong’s discussions of the interiorization of technologies.) In other words, as a field of study, media ecology is a grammar that explores the unrecognized function of language, media, and technology (the glamour) as systems (grammarye).
It’s an idea we shouldn’t take too seriously, but it is a bit of Sunday morning fun.
“I decided to quote Matthews here rather than summarize her argument because…”
During the discussion after Cheryl Ball‘s Jacobson Lecture at this year’s Jacobson Symposium, the question of how to assess new media projects came up, as it almost always does when composition teachers talk about assigning projects that don’t follow the traditional print-based essay. As might be expected, Cheryl’s answer included a discussion of a design justification in which students explain the choices they make in the creation of their new media projects. I’ve used them for years too, as have most of us. But something clicked in this umpteenth time I’ve been in this discussion. Why, I thought and then asked, do we limit design justifications to non-traditional projects? Why don’t we ask students to include detailed design justifications with all composition projects regardless of whether it is a video composition, a collage, a web site, or a traditional academic essay?
Anyone do this?
A Rhetorically Minded Anthropologist
I know it’s well beyond the moment to be posting about Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us,” but for whatever reason I didn’t get around to posting this until now. What I want to comment on is not the video itself but the fact that it was an anthropologist who made it. I think it was on Jenny’s blog that I first saw reference to the video in the blogosphere, but I first learned about the video earlier that morning when Wesch himself posted a link to it on the Media Ecology discussion list.
In her post, Jenny asks the really good question:
By the way, why is it that I find such smart work being done in other fields (like cultural anthropology) that don’t seem to have a problem with the notion of rhetorics, or even the notion of rethinking it? Meanwhile, seems like we’re still working on that newfangled “wheel” thingamajig.
I wonder if we’re all too often working on that “wheel” because as we’re focusing inward far too much in an attempt to assert disciplinary status, and in doing so we’re forgetting to look around us. This isn’t a new idea, at least among many of those in my blogroll, and I think Jeff Rice put his finger on the problem in his 2005 Composition Studies article “The 1963 Composition Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Computed, or Demonstrated by Any Other Means of Technology.”
We, as a field, don’t find ourselves rubbing shoulders with cultural anthropologists because we, as a field, decided to equate composition, and our connection to rhetoric, with print literacy. We decided that the interests of McLuhan, Postman, Havelock, and to a lesser extent Ong — media ecologists all — were not what composition studies should be about. While I might be wrong, I can’t help but see the technology plank dustup and the ongoing unsubscribing from WPA-L and even TechRhet as closely related phenomena.
Why Ravens? Or, Working Towards a Cognitive Poetic Reading of a Myth
Readers of this blog may know, if for no other reason than that I discuss it from time to time, that Odin’s two ravens are named Hugin and Munin, Thought and Memory respectively. As I’ve suggested before, in the myth of Odin’s two ravens we find thought and memory separate but intimately linked together: a clear understanding of memory as something much more than memorization and recall. One question we must ask about these ravens is whether or not it’s significant that they are ravens. Or, put another way, why ravens? Read more
The Orality of Martin Luther King, Jr.
As you might expect, the Media Ecology Association discussion list often turns to Ong and Ongian issues from time to time. Ken mentions one such recent discussion, and I’m posting here about another.
Martin Luther King, Jr. came up in a discussion of contemporary oral and literate discourse because he was “literate and oriented toward orality.” Someone else suggested that we can use the concept of bidialecticism to understand how “MLK could use orality to his advantage when he wanted to, and yet use the literate mode of discourse when he wanted to.”
While I completely agree that bidialecticism and the subsequent code-switching that comes with being bidialectical does explain in linguistic terms how we all move between such multiple forms of discourse, I was surprised by the idea that we would need to explain this phenomena, that it would be an orality-literacy issue. As the discussion developed over the period of a few days, I realized how and why this was an orality-literacy issue, and here, in revised form, is my belated post, which is offered not as a definitive statement but as a musing, as a probe in the McLuhanesque sense. Read more
More Musing on Ong’s Terms Secondary Literacy and Secondary Visualism
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked if I thought the digitality was/could bridge the oral-literacy “divide” (this is, I would suggest, different from the “orality-literacy divide” discussed by proponents of the “great leap theory.” While the orality-literacy “divide,” which is what we are discussing below, is primarily an issue of medium, the supposed great leap “orality-literacy divide” is an issue of noetics). I include here a slightly edited version of my response, which was and still very much remains, a rambling late night musing on a topic I circle around from time to time:
You’re dealing with what I’ve found to be one of the most difficult issues relating to Ong’s work, and while this is just my opinion, you’re doing much better than most who have tried. I hear you on wanting that third term. Some years ago — maybe 1999 or so — I started refering to it as “the third way.” I haven’t made a systematic effort to solve the issue, but rather I just think about it from time to time. My “Tertiary Orality, Secondary Literacy, and Residual Orality” post pretty much sums up my thinking at the moment. Read more
“They Say, I Say” as Memory Text
[Note: The following is a modified from a posting I sent to the Teaching Composition discussion list earlier today. I'd been thinking about Graff and Birkenstein's They Say, I Say from the perspective of memoria when someone posted a complaint about its use of templates.]
Hearing about the praise Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing has been getting, I thought I’d give the book a look. My initial reaction to the formulaic approach of the book was one of unease. It’s premised upon the notion that academic writing can be reduced to formulas which we can use to enter into conversations with others. In other words, it seeks to teach academic writing through the use of templates. I put the book aside and started looking elsewhere for next semester. But there was someting about the book that kept nagging at me.
And then yesterday, as I was rereading some of Walter Ong’s discussions of the role of rhapsody in rhetoric–in particular, his reviews of Brian Vicker’s Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry and Samuel Howell’s Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, and his article “Typographic Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare”–for my dissertation chapter on database technologies as compositional tools, I began to realize why I couldn’t just leave They Say, I Say alone. Maybe, I thought to myself, I’m assuming the templates are a form of Ramist method rather than a form of commonplace thinking, a contemporary approach to rhapsodizing. Read more
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