Review: Literacy, Technology and Society (Prentice Hall) (Final)

Literacy, Technology and Society: Confronting the Issues (eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia E. Selfe) is a 1997 textbook that aims to engage with technology as both object and method of study, framing information technology—specifically, computers and the Internet—in social, political, historical and critical terms. Its project, and the need to imagine using this book in a composition classroom, have prompted me to re-imagine, perhaps for the first time, a way for learning to take place—even as the book’s out-of-datedness in terms of not only content but style (I can’t believe I just said that, me the fuddy of all print-duddies), unfortunately ruled it out as a primary text I would choose for that experiment in teaching. I hate to begin a review on so evaluative a note, but I honestly feel that in this case it’s warranted; the rapid and minute evolutions of technology have, of course, resulted in a whole new landscape into which this text only awkwardly fits, and I will say more on this later.

First, though, on to what Literacy, Technology and Society does offer. The book is divided into five sections: “Social Issues and Technology;” “Education and Technology;” “Ethics, Law and Technology;” “Gender and Technology;” and “Government and Technology.” Each section contains a mix of scholarly essays, articles aimed at a broader audience, visual representations of technology, and fiction. There are also four appendices: a guide to how to “look” and analyze visual text; guides to citing electronic text in the APA and MLA styles; and a copy of the Bill of Rights, which is intended for students to use as they consider the various ethics, legal implications and possibilities at play and at stake in the Information Age—which a number of the essays and exercises will ask them to do.

What interests me most about this book is its explicitly ideological position that one does, should and must confront “issues” when using technology and its interest in drawing students’ attention to those issues—and as I mentioned earlier, this led me to think about working with technology differently than I have so far, and to a new conception of teaching, in which I (as teacher and fuddy-duddy) might be able to help students gain some critical distance (”academicize,” as Stanley Fish would say) technology even as they train me in it, or rather in their immersion-experience of it. After all, this is the sea they swim in, at least at MU, from what I can tell of my students so far; whether they have ever taken a step back and analyzed that experience or even tried to make it visible, is another question, one this book could help to explore. So if they work within and produce New Media, what I can do is help them to look at it critically, revise the product, just like I do with papers. (Oh. Will I forever be struck by the blindingly obvious?) Meanwhile, they would be able to bring to bear their own unique experience, authority and identity around technology; it would all become more of an exchange of perspectives than I have yet been able to achieve around, say, literature or film or political writing of my own choosing, and about which I inevitably feel more prepared to speak than they do.

Even the age and creakiness of the book may be of some value. Reading documents produced prior to and assembled at the brink of the information and technology explosion—several of the materials produced, in fact, in the 80s, and some of the fiction even earlier—could provide fodder for discussion of and writing about how the information landscape and aesthetic have changed in the years that these students have spent growing up. Also, those articles which examine, for example, the kinds of lifesaving communities that the Internet offers gay teens, and problems of Internet stalking, could provide the basis for wider research and discussion, a kind of bringing up-to-date of the discourse.

As with Reading City Life, and as the previous paragraph implies, I see some meta-value and meta-possibilities for this text. Its sheer size and look—601 pages, mostly of dense, black and white text—offer an aesthetic experience so at odds with the aesthetic experience of the world it is discussing that I imagine that contrast itself constituting the course’s central exigence. Students could discuss what a book which aims to provoke critical thought about the Internet in 2008/9 should look like, or whether such a critique should be in a book form at all, and over the course of the semester work to create an alternative version. This could involve excerpting from the book, reorganizing, and writing their own contributions. They could contrast the science fiction with more contemporary fiction, including, say, fan fiction on the Internet.

As for the collected materials, and their framing, taken together (and in some cases individually) they do operate according to the social-epistemic model, asking students to consider technology from a number of vantage points, and its impact upon different areas of social, economic and imaginative life (the imaginative being represented by the science fiction and articles on cyborgs and so on). Its left-leaning, progressive ideology is fore-fronted in mini-introductions to each text: one, with regard to an academic journal article on “the specific problems women and other underrepresented groups on campus encounter online” (348), invites readers to “think about electronic groups in relation to sexism and to decide what, if any, actions need to be taken on your own campus” as they read (348). The writing exercises that follow involve contacting women’s groups on campuses and intervewing representatives, making lists of ways that online communities “discriminate against men,” and developing workable plans for combating online discrimination that are to be sent to appropriate faculty, staff and students. “Writing and Learning,” as Hawisher and Selfe title the exercise sections following the articles, are therefore deeply connected to taking action in a real world context in this book—again, consistent with the social epistemic model of pedagogy. There are also multiple extended writing exercises that involve online research, identification of relevant URLs, and so on, but most of these introductions to the actual use of technology seem buried in the text-dense, traditional writing-focused context. A teacher would probably do well not to rely on this text as a prompt for the hands-on work, but to use it instead as part of a broader and more applied syllabus, in which it could serve to generate wider historical and ethical discussions around that work.

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