Review: Literate Lives in the Information Age

Karen Mooney

Professor Barbara Gleason

English C0865

March 20, 2014

Review: Literate Lives in the Information Age

Selfe, Cynthia L. and Gail E. Hawisher. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of

            Literacy From the United States. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

“Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy From the United States,” by Cythia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher sets out to “trace technological literacy as it emerged” during the watershed years between 1978 and 2003. Through the life histories of 20 people of various ages, the authors aim to capture how and why people acquired and developed--or failed to acquire and develop--the literacies of technology as personal computers made their way into the American mainstream. By the turn of the 21^st century, they note, “the ability to read, compose and communicate in computer environments…[had] acquired immense importance not only as a basic job skills, but also…as an essential component of literate activity” (1). And while that process had already been underway for some time, there was little documentation of people’s opportunities, motivations, or of the social forces that influenced this new form of literacy. The expansive research project reported in this book attempted to fill that gap before users’ memories faded and the technology became so common as to be invisible.

Selfe and Hawisher direct their attention specifically to what they call technological literacy (alternately electronic or digital literacy), “the practices involved in reading, writing and exchanging information in online environments, as well as the values associated with such practices—cultural, social, political, and educational” (2). They distinguish it from computer literacy, which they define as obtaining to the specific skills required to operate the machines.

The authors’ pursuit is consistent with the understanding of literacy, like Street, Gee, Graff, and Brandt, as a set of practices and values situated in a particular historical and socio-cultural context. Deborah Brandt was particularly influential both in focus and concern. In fact, it was a talk by Brandt about her oral-history literacy project in 1998 that inspired this work. Selfe and Hawisher recognized that technological literacy, like traditional literacy, is practiced in specific cultural, material, educational, and material contexts that vary by levels of social, economic, educational, and technological support for this new literacy. They call the inter-relatedness of all these factors the cultural ecology of literacy.

  Over the course of six years, Selfe and Hawisher generated case studies of more than 350 people, each subject participating in a lengthy interview and filling out an extensive technological literacy questionnaire. Their final selection for this volume included 20 people, aged 14 to 60 at the point of contact, of differing classes, races, genders, and educational achievement, and from various types of communities in different regions of the country.

Selfe and Hawisher clustered their subjects in groups of two to four, around themes that they present in seven chapters, and largely by birth cohort. Each chapter begins by situating the characters in their socio-historical context, the cultural ecology of their time, presenting them through oral history. The authors engaged in a collaborative telling with study participants, co-authoring the accounts where the subjects were willing, resulting in what they called “technological literacy autobiographies” (7).

Chapter 1, “Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology,” begins in the 1980’s with the emergence of the personal computer technology that would profoundly change literacy. The decade began with a stubborn recession and a Cold War polarity that spurred new investment in technology. President Reagan proposed the Star Wars defense system at the same time that universities and the military were collaborating to create ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet. In 1981, IBM released its first PC, Time magazine named the Computer “Man of the Year,” and the first email rocketed into cyberspace. The Apple McIntosh followed in 1984. By the end of the decade, computers had made their way into many homes and classrooms.

The three people profiled in Chapter 1 were born in the late 1970’s and grew up in the 80’s. They were the first generation to encounter computers as children and to emerge as adults into a world that expected them to use them. Their lives, the authors say, “trace a period in which the definition of literacy changed significantly” (33). The case studies here include two suburban White women, one middle class, one upper middle class, and an African-American man from a struggling Detroit family. All three came from families that valued reading and literacy, and all three were first exposed to computers in elementary school where time on the machines was considered a privilege. As children, they enjoyed games and chat rooms and learned for the most part by experimentation and sharing. At the time the book was written, all three were studying Scientific and Technical Communications in college. The women seemed to be on a path to success. The young man, however, though already carving out a career in web design that began with his participation in an African American fraternity, was focusing on technological literacy practice at the expense of traditional skills. While he chose the communications field partly because its focus on language meshed with his love of rap music, his scholastic achievement faltered because he devalued the traditional literacy skills upon which academic success rest.

With these first three case studies, as in all of those in the book, Selfe and Hawisher reveal the often power but sometimes subtle influence of class, race, family, and opportunity in shaping each person’s acquisition and development of technological literacy. But they also reveal that the subjects were also shaping the literacy technology and practice that was growing up along with them, through their purchasing power and by their choice of study and profession. The authors stress that technological influence works in both directions.

Chapter Two, “Privileging—or Not—the Literacies of Technology,” traces three White women born in the late 60’s, at a time of great social change that included a second-wave of feminism. They reached their majority in the decade of the 1980’s, which was not only the first for the personal computer, but what the United Nations declared “The Decade of the Woman.” Ten years older than the group profiled in Chapter 1, school played virtually no part in these women’s acquisition of literacies of technology; schools in general were following, not leading, the movement. Computers entered their homes first through gaming, often playing with family members. While men were traditionally more likely to adopted new technologies, all three women developed exceptional competency, though gender did shape their attitudes about it in varying ways. One woman from an upper middle class family, the most traditionally privileged of the group, viewed computers primarily as an aid to traditional literacies; her class standing did, however, give her the confidence to master technologies when they were presented. A second woman, because she was from a more working-class background and had more freedom to experiment with social norms, developed an identity that prized using “boys’ toys.” The third woman grew up in a military environment where technology was a pervasive cultural value regardless of gender. All three women went on to work in university environments, two as writing instructors and the third in instructional technology, where they fully incorporated technology into their literacy practice. Their stories reveal how nuances of class and gender influenced that outcome.

Chapter Three, “Complicating Access: Gateways to the Literacies of Technology,” introduces the notion of technological gateways as sites and occasions for digital literacy, but it concludes that the conditions of access at those gateways play a determining role. Schools, workplaces, communities, and homes are the primary gateways, but contact with computers there is not sufficient to becoming digitally literate. Among the limiting conditions are timing, motivation, fit, safety, resources, and the appropriateness of equipment.

The two people profiled in this chapter to illustrate this conclusion were both born in 1955. One White man from an educated middle class family was first exposed to computers as a college engineering major. However, the scientific and data-oriented orientation of the technology did not suit his learning style, educational values, or learning goals. When he switched to a communications major and started writing for the school newspaper, however, he used computers in a way that came alive for him. He went on to build a career in professional communications, leading his institution in its adoption of word processing, desktop publishing, and Internet applications. Later, as a member of his local school board, he saw that having computers in the classrooms did not guarantee their use for literacy purposes; teachers had to know how to implement the technology and be enthusiastic about doing so.

In this chapter, the authors also profile a woman who grew up in poverty on a Native American reservation. After completing a nursing program at a community college, she found that her workplace required only low-level technology skills, such as entering data into monitoring devices, rather than literacy applications. Technical support there was also very limited. Eventually, she became the Native American Outreach coordinator for a local university, where she employed a full range of technology literacies and enabled others in her community to do the same.

Both people profiled in this chapter also established computer gateways in their homes for their children and family members, attending to the comfort and safety of the environment in which they were used, two additional conditions of access that affect developing literacy.

Chapter Four, “Shaping Cultures: Prizing the Literacies of Technology,” introduces two people born in the last year of the baby boom, 1964, one a Latino male, the other an African-American woman. Each of them was influenced by the values of their class, race, and ethnicity in their approach to digital literacy, more acutely so perhaps because of the social activism in their communities during the era in which they grew up. At the time they were interviewed, both were college-level writing instructors but they differed in their enthusiasm about computers. The Mexican-American man, who hailed from the Los Angeles area, accessed literacy and developed an interest in college through the sports culture that was pervasive in his environment. Although not an especially academic culture, good athletes often play in college and this observation spurred him to achieve. But because he had a high need for physical movement, he did not like sitting at a desk looking at a screen. More importantly, though, he felt that working at a computer denied him the personal interaction and connection he craved and that he believed was part of his Latino culture. As a result, he used computers only when he had to. The African-American woman profiled here disagreed on every score. Hailing from a military family that prized technology, she and her family embraced computers in their home. The many “firsts” that Blacks achieved as she grew up gave her the confidence to pursue her interests, including technology. And as a Black woman who was excluded from racially dominant expectations of femininity, she had a certain freedom to experiment with traditional gender definitions that might otherwise have limited her technological prowess. But unlike the Mexican-American man, computer technology and the Internet in particular were sources of community and engagement, not isolation, for her. She connected with affinity networks online, and createed literacy opportunities for her students using new media tools. The authors conclude again here, that both people in this chapter borrowed from the various cultures of which they are a part to shape their practice of literacy, and in turn influenced the way in which it was practiced in their cultures.

Chapter 5, “Those Who Share: Three Generations of Black Women,” “looks at the roles families play in changing and sustaining generational patterns of literacy practices and values” (133). The authors profile three generations of African-Women women from one family in South Carolina. Though they all valued and engaged in literate practices, their mastery of them was frequently compromised by other social influences, including economic stress, impoverished schools, and peer pressure.

The first generation family member, born in 1942, was forced to drop out of high school to help support the family after both of her parents died. Without that education, her work opportunities were limited. She had no opportunity to develop technological literacy, and found that she rarely had the luxury of time for the poetry she had once loved to write. Her niece, born in 1971, was more fortunate: her mother had completed an associate’s degree, bought an early home computer, and enrolled her in a summer computer course. She went on to complete a Masters Degree in Professional Communication. Her niece, born in 1987, had few of those advantages. While she, too, valued literacy and saw her own mother reading, they did not have a home computer, teachers at her school were not able to use effectively the few computers they had, and her group of friends did not value traditional literacies. The middle-generation family member here, who had achieved so much, worked to connect the generations to technological literacy with some success, but the family’s experience also reveals that the promise of computers is still dimmed by the traditional axes of race, class, and poverty.

Chapter 6, “Inspiring Women: Social Movements and the Literacies of Technology,” follows three White women, born in the early 50’s, each of whom followed unconventional paths toward digital literacy. They, like other women of their generation, had new choices open to them as they became adults, including, with the emergence of reliable birth control, when to have children. None of the three women completed a college degree directly out of high school but neither did they settle immediately into the traditional female roles of wife and mother.

Selfe and Hawisher introduce the concept of benefactor in this chapter. None of these women had powerful technological literacy sponsors, as Brandt would define them--agents who provided literacy skills for the benefit of the agent--but each had an important benefactor or supporter who opened doors. One woman was given a computer by her mother-in-law who encouraged her, another benefitted from her husband’s experience establishing a computer lab at the school where he taught, and the third was encouraged by her bosses who recognized her literacy skills and by a friend who helped her build a computer when she couldn’t afford to buy one. The women’s resulting expertise opened new paths to professional success and allowed them to take advantage of emerging opportunities. The authors conclude then, that while gender and age can limit technological literacy acquisition, some people can find ways to develop and support their skills even when their circumstances aren’t ideal. They also suggest that societal shifts, such as the women’s movement, can create new opportunities that those less fixed in traditional hierarchies may be in a better position to seize.

In Chapter 7, “The Future of Literacy,” Selfe and Hawisher show the new literacy skills in action. All four people profiled here blend words with a new digital language that includes visual, kinesthetic, mapping, navigating, and interactive skills.

            Two of the chapter’s subjects were born in 1973, part of the first computer literate generation, but both pushed the boundaries of how the technology can be used to communicate.

One subject, a White woman, was directed toward conventional academic pursuits by her mother, but turned toward gaming as a powerful outlet for creativity and communication. Comic books were an early portal for a White man from a large Mormon family. He went on to blend what he learned from his art teacher father with some preliminary study in engineering into a career in communications and graphic design. He used web-based digital tools to experiment with predominantly visual “arguments.”

The two youngest members profiled here, born in 1985 and 1986, were still in high school when they were interviewed. Each of them had learned to use computers at about the same time that they learned to read. One of the subjects, a young White woman with six older siblings, remembered playing with computers at age 5. By high school, she saw that the visual composition of the websites she designed influenced her message. The other subject here, a Mixed-Race young man, knew that he was more likely to be successful in the digital world if he had strong traditional literacy skills. He keenly observed the connections between the two arenas, seeing that the online games for which he had a passion have genres, grammars, rules, and rhetoric, just like literature. He envisioned a curriculum of the future that would focus on developing both visual and alphabetic literacies.

The four young people presented in Chapter 7 practiced technological literacy skills that were largely self-taught and for the most part invisible to their teachers. In fact, they often shared their skills “upstream” to their families and teachers, too. The new paradigm reflects a profound social shift that is transforming all institutions, including education. As Selfe and Hawisher write, “Young people no longer have the luxury of relying solely on the information provided by their elders to equip them for a changing world” (205). Teachers must become guides and mediators, working collaboratively with their students.

Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age is an ambitious documentation of the merging of computers with literacy practices as the new technology appeared in the world. The scholarly framework within which they construct and analyze the project--their understanding of literacy and their collaborative life-history methodology--is extremely thorough. They have successfully woven the historical, social, and historical forces of the final years of the twentieth century into a tapestry that includes the threads of their case histories as well. But their most outstanding contribution may be that they captured this information when they did because, as they explain, “Most technologies become so enmeshed in daily experience that they disappear” (7). The statement triggers self-reflection: When did I send that first email and to whom? How did we write and communicate at work before computers? How and why am I adopting new technologies today?

The chief weaknesses in Literate Lives in the Information Age, however, are its choice of subjects and its failure to animate their lives more fully. A sample of 20 case studies that includes 15 women, ten of them White and middle class, does not seem a balanced portrait of literacy in the United States. The characters are so similar at times that it becomes impossible to distinguish them. Admittedly, the decades they examined were transformational for most women. The authors also concede that they chose stories because “they resonate with parts of our own stories” (5). But the choice of a selection that is differentiated by subtle nuances detracts from the work’s lessons and scholarship. Similarly, the preponderance of subjects who went on to work in university environments, many in writing instruction in particular, limits its breadth. The authors have paid must less attention to the second half of their inquiry, why people failed to acquire digital literacies and how they may have lagged behind as a result.

Selfe and Hawisher would have done better to choose fewer characters. But they would certainly have made them more distinguishable had they presented their stories more fully and made them appear more real. It may have been a matter of spending more time with each, but they might also have attended to the affective influences on their adoption of new literacy skills. The questionnaire subjects filled out, presented as an appendix in the book, does ask them to tell the story of their first contact with computers and first learning how to use them, but without any prompts as to what might make those stories come to life. The questionnaire mainly probes for facts and asks subjects what they think, not how they feel. What about the wonder, excitement, intimidation or even dread with which one might approach a new technology? There is substantial evidence both that the affective domain influences learning in general (Hilgard) and that wonder and curiosity aid learning new technologies in particular, while fear inhibits it (Mordini).

Despite its flaws, Literate Lives in the Information Age is a significant contribution to the documentation of both literacy and technology practices in America, adding a specific new dimension to Deborah Brandt’s literacy study. It will be fascinating to see what researchers find when they look back and closely examine today’s technological literacy, including shorthand communications like texting and twitter, multi-modal ones like Facebook and Instagram, and the resources of the interactive Internet, so many of them being developed beyond the traditional gateways of literacy. Selfe and Hawisher have constructed a solid foundation upon which that future research may be built.

Works Cited

Hilgard, E. “Motivation in Learning Theory.” Psychology: A Study of Science. (Volume 5).

 Ed. S. Koch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. 267. Print.

Mordini, Emilio. “Technology and Fear: Is Wonder the Key?” Trends in Biotechnology 25:12 (2007): 544-546. Online.