I am often confused by those I call "print privilegers" and their view of
how any kind of "reading" is learned. After all, "text" comes in many, many
forms. The complete Homeric legends, the Norse Sagas, the Celtic Cycles,
were all "written," absorbed, analyzed, understood, adapted, and "read"
before alphabetical reading was ever involved in any of these. And people
read landscapes and situations, cultures, and complex environments before
reading. And they developed civilization, engineering, agriculture,
religion, and, yes, literature, before reading as well.

But now we tend to think of "print literature" - "ink-on-paper reading"- as
somehow both "natural" and "essential." I think it is neither.

Yes, the Gutenberg era created a form of literature and thus a certain form
of literacy. It created "straight-line" literature and straight line
thinking. It fit perfectly with Lutheran and Calvinist religion, in its
directional and fixed nature. And we have taught it and taught it and taught
it. - How many hours of instruction have your students received in analyzing
and processing traditional print forms? Now how any hours have you spent
teaching them to process and analyze post-Gutenberg digital text forms?

This isn't about consumerism. Ink-on-paper literature has always been a
capitalist enterprise, based on expensive technologies, controlled by the
few and the powerful. Books have been, in fact, powerful instruments of
control - consider newspapers, textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and
who decides what gets on the library shelves or the shelves at Barnes and
Noble.

And it isn't about knowledge or cultural transmission either (though it
surely is about social reproduction). In the print era many authors tried to
fight print's inherent limitations. Think Dos Passos, or Ferlinghetti. Think
of the New York Modernists merging text with painting, or the rise of comic
books and graphic novels. It is really a question of helping students to
learn how to look at a chaotic world and make sense of it.

The New York Times, a while back in an article on Twitter -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html - in which he
described a process:

"Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would
appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck
the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates
were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick;
one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their
nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she
made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be
virtually meaningless.

"But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was
beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had
before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her
Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally
turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days
at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of
sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew
accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

"This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each
individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even
supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets
coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and
family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would
bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient
information becomes like "a type of E.S.P.," as Haley described it to me, an
invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
'"It's like I can distantly read everyone's mind," Haley went on to say. "I
love that. I feel like I'm getting to something raw about my friends. It's
like I've got this heads-up display for them." It can also lead to more
real-life contact, because when one member of Haley's group decides to go
out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it,
and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when
they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they've never actually
been apart. They don't need to ask, "So, what have you been up to?" because
they already know. Instead, they'll begin discussing something that one of
the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the
middle."

This is a powerful communication form, and a powerful way to build
knowledge. It is not shallow in the least, or, I suppose, it is only shallow
to those who have not yet learned to look beneath the surface. But that's
true of words on a page too, isn't it?

In the end we either engage with and actively teach literacy in this
post-Gutenberg age, or we become irrelevant - or maybe we become Latin
teachers in the 1950s - an interesting artifact prized by historians.

I have come to believe that this "reading of screens" is far more human than
the Gutenberg-era technologies. In many ways we have (as Bonnie suggested)
"come full circle." Digital text, multi-modal texts, screen text, all brings
us back to an era when we had to build theory out of multiple bits of
information swirling about us in many forms. That seems to me much more
difficult than attending to a single author or lecturer for a set amount of
time, but it also opens new world's of intellectual possibility.

Anyway, we fool ourselves when we speak of "digital natives." There is no
such thing. The skills needed for post-Gutenberg literacy must be learned.
The developing norms must be challenged. Critical literacy - in any literacy
- needs to be brought to students.

I think we have a lot to do.

And with that rant - a Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Ira David Socol
Special Education Technology Researcher
Michigan State University
College of Education
irasocol -at- gmail -dot- com
socolira -at- msu -dot- edu
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/
http://riverfoylepress.com/


On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Bonnie Odiorne
<bonniesophia at sbcglobal.net>wrote:


> David, and colleagues,

> Thank you for the timing of this article. I began my English composition

> class with some articles that appeared here, I believe, about the impact of

> technology on reading, and most particularly on newspapers. My students

> didn't seem terribly bothered about this, or about the fact that they may be

> reading in "sound bytes" (to mix a metaphor.) Coming now to the end of the

> course, I'm convinced more than ever that this is true for the majority of

> the students, who seem unable (or unwilling?) to sustain reading enough to

> trace an argument, or to perform analogous operations in writing. Of course,

> it sounds as if your article implies that the manipulations of a fluent text

> reader should be available to the fluent screen reader as well. But, as we

> approach Black Friday, I wonder if we've become consumers of the text as

> much as of the screen without doing more than scratching the surface. I gave

> the class an exercise of describing in detail an object in their possession.

> Most of them waxed eloquent about their cell phones: how "cool" they were,

> extolling their features to the extent that these descriptions became little

> more than product specs for the latest gadgetry. Far be it for me to decry

> the convenience of the cell phone; I'm the owner of a Smartphone, which I

> use to manipulate the texts of my daily life: schedules, memoes, and, if I

> could get Documents to Go to work, of actual texts and spreadsheets as well.

> Are we suggesting that visual literacy should proceed to critical literacy,

> analyzing these images, or learning to manipulate the technology to create

> yet more images? I can't wait to read the article to find out. I intend to

> use this text to end the class. Thanks for helping me come full circle.

> P.S. Some of these students are superb writers, or would be if they could

> shed their consumerism of both language and "stuff." Not the "stuff" of

> adult literacy, but many of our students are "underperforming" (how I hate

> that word) which means we as teachers need to meet them where they are.

> Gratefully yours,

> Bonnie Odiorne

> Post University Writing Center

>

> --- On *Tue, 11/25/08, David Rosen <DJRosen at theworld.com>* wrote:

>

> From: David Rosen <DJRosen at theworld.com>

> Subject: [Technology 1802] People of the Screen

> To: "The Technology and Literacy Discussion List" <technology at nifl.gov>

> Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 8:13 AM

>

> Colleagues,

>

> Can you read fluently? Of course, you say. But maybe not. Although I

> meant, can you read text, I also meant, can you read screens? Very

> few of us can. Some of our younger students are more screen literate

> than we are. Is screen literacy important? If getting to meaning, and

> to the truth, is important, screen literacy is as important -- some

> would argue more important -- than reading. However, "If text

> literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new

> screen fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images

> with the same ease. But so far, these 'reader' tools of visuality

> have not made their way to the masses."

>

> I hope I have tantalized you to read this short and fascinating

> article on screen literacy by New York Times writer Kevin Kelley:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23wwln-future-t.html?_r=1

>

> I would also like to invite you, when you read -- or see -- something

> that we in technology and literacy might be interested in, to post

> the URL to this discussion list. If we are a community of practice on

> this discussion list,  then let's help each other to learn new

> things, think in new ways.

>

> Your thoughts on the article?

>

> David J. RosenDJRosen at theworld.com

>

>

>

>

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>

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>

>

> ----------------------------------------------------

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