Book Review

Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet

Edited by Todd Taylor and Irene Ward
Columbia University Press
New York
US$17.50 (paper)

While many essays in this collection by American academics will appeal only to specialists in literacy theory, many could have a broader appeal. Few, however, will fully satisfy readers from any background. Nonetheless, as Gregory Ulmer suggests in the foreword, the collection will likely "serve as a benchmark for measuring the shifts and movements within the disciplines devoted to writing" (p. ix). The book earns its benchmark status by being one of the first collections, since the Internet became the social phenomenon that it now is, to address the issues figured in its title.

Background

For those individuals who are unfamiliar with literacy theory, the essays provide no background. They gradually reveal that the main trends in the field are teaching students to write with a focus on process rather than product and student-centred rather than teacher-centred instruction. The technologies the essays deal with include Multi-User Domains (MUDs), the World Wide Web, e-mail, and writing software like the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment.

While none of the authors exhibit the utopian fantasies of the futurists who used to get so much attention for their blathering about the Internet a few short years ago, some of them are mildly optimistic about the potentials of technology to enhance equality, democracy, and community by enabling the development of writing skills. Others are less sanguine. The essays range from straightforward reports about pedagogic projects to ambitious theoretical ruminations. In general, the teachers seem more positive about the technology, while the theorists are often darkly ominous in their pronouncements.

Practice

The essays about practical writing and teaching projects are the easiest to assess. In "Writing in the Hivemind," Don Byrd and Derek Owens summarize a collaborative writing project in which they and ten other writers gathered in a software environment to write together. The participants felt that the technology helped them "to rediscover what it means not just to work collaboratively with others but to think with them" (p. 57). The authors highlight how beneficial the experience was for the participants; just as well, since the passages they quote from their collective text are all but meaningless to outsiders.

Terry Craig, Leslie Harris, and Richard Smith report in "Rhetoric of the 'Contact Zone'" on their experiment in linking up composition classes in different universities through computer conferencing. While these "practitioners of liberatory pedagogies" were disconcerted at their periodic loss of control of the experiment, they conclude by speculating that the technology will help students "become not only more forceful, persuasive writers but also more powerful critical thinkers, courageous enough to challenge oppression and open to disparate ideas and value systems" (p. 143). Another hopeful message is delivered by Patricia Fitzsimmons-Hunter and Charles Moran. In "Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change" they conclude that their experiments show ways that teachers can be empowered to become "the most effective agents of change" (p. 168).

Todd Taylor's "confessional analysis" (p. 118) of his experience in designing his department's "first ever computer-supported writing classroom" (p. 110) is less optimistic. Lacing his analysis with a liberal dose of the theories of Michel Foucault, Taylor concludes that any compositional pedagogy will be "inevitably bound up in mechanisms of authority, punishment, coercion, and control" (p. 119). Similarly, in "Reading the Networks of Power," Tim Mayers and Kevin Swafford argue that those engaged in "writing instruction in networked classrooms … may feel … that we are working simultaneously toward both the liberation and the oppression of our students" (p. 155). Neither of these essays offers any solution other than to point out the contradictions and complexities of the situation they address.

The editors have reprinted as the opening essay an address by Lester Faigley, whose 1992 book Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition is the publication most often cited by other authors in the collection. The address was from Faigley as chair to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and is spoken from his position as a teacher and a director of a large college writing program. He reiterates statistics on Internet use, on economic inequality, and on college funding to suggest that writing teachers "are caught in a riptide that is carrying us away from where we want to go" (p. 4) and to wonder whether they "can sustain a shared sense of values when in many respects history is not on our side" (p. 13). The theorists in the collection are engaged in a murky search for what those values should be.

Theory

The more dense with theory the essay, the more despairing the author. The conclusions the theorists arrive at also often seem lame, especially after the expenditure of so much theoretical sound and fury. These impressions may simply reflect my inadequacies in penetrating the profundities being offered. Nonetheless, when, after ten pages of theorizing, Raul Sanchez realizes that he is simply teaching students to be isolated consumers and "wonder[s] if there are any alternatives that don't simply turn a blind eye to the technological realities in front of me and my students, that offer possibilities for resistance" (p. 104), this reader wonders what he has missed.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola uses theory to show how computer-mediated communications can lead us further in what he sees as the direction postmodernist texts must follow. This path is "between extremes of enlightenment authorship and postmodernist dispersal of agency and identity into powerless lines of indeterminate intensities" (pp. 31–32). He has tried to show us this path through a survey of other theorists and by presenting two examples; the examples he produces, however, do not prove much. In "prosthetic_rhetorics@writing.loss.technology" Cynthia Haynes seems to be searching for the same path but, beginning with its title, her essay is simply too obscure and trendy to communicate anything to those outside of her immediate hermeneutic circle.

In "We Are Not Just (Electronic) Words," Beth E. Kolko reaches for ideas that could be of great consequence in the debate about the practices of writing and learning to write in cyberspace. She begins from the premise that language is central to the creation of identities, both on-line and off. She then tackles the problem of how to attach accountability to the dispersed, multiple, fluid, and fragmented on-line self. Through "a particular combination of rhetorical and legal theory" (p. 68) she reaches for a solution to this problem. She argues that "it is utterly imperative that we interject accountability into that formulation of cyberspace as a place of multiple selves" (p. 74) and suggests how this imperative might be achieved. Kolko's theories could help shape the legal, political, social, and pedagogical future of computer-mediated communications. They would also make literacy theorists and practitioners extremely important to that future.

One last essay in the collection raises an impressive structure of theory to carry a fairly traditional analysis of a novel. Not just any novel, William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) originated the term cyberspace and is often seen as the text that brought the concept into popular culture. The analysis that William Colvino presents leads to the conclusion that "cyberpunk literacy … would seem to offer transcendence and power, but finally the working-class cyberpunk remains just that, adept at infiltrating a 'consensual hallucination' he cannot really affect" (p. 44). Colvino's structure of theory is meant to install this conclusion in the middle of the literacy theory field, raising the question, "why write?" (p. 45).

Conclusion

That question, "why write?" must have been asked by all of the contributors to this collection. It is clear that the Internet and computer-mediated communications in general have brought the teaching of composition to a crisis. Literacy theorists are trying to think their way through the crisis and writing teachers are trying to work their way through it. This collection reports on some of the results that they have achieved so far. It is a preliminary report, however, and, while it may point to some of the directions that will be followed, it does little beyond demonstrating that a crisis exists.

John Thurston holds a doctorate in English. He has written The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), as well as numerous published articles on early nineteenth-century Canadian literature.