Literate Lives, contingent on tech.

This week’s assignment:

Selfe, Cynthia L and Hawisher, Gail E. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy From the United States. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 2004.

Cynthia Selfe created an interview strategy which chronicles the computer literacy of twenty people over several generations, social classes, ethnicities and cultures, within the United States. They repeat the interview structure and also the mode of interrogation of ideas throughout Literate Lives, which makes it a sedate experience to read. Their themes for the study, listed in the conclusion, are clear throughout the text.

Each chapter proceeds from an introduction of two or three interviewees to a historical context for interview subjects’ experience. These historical summaries are my favorite recurring segment of the book, since they are focused, angling toward civil rights and individual autonomy, and interested in the region where the subjects were raised. These sections stand out because the condensation of history comes from a different set of narrow sources in each chapter, and the several authors of each chapter have done an excellent job (to my mind) of setting the stage for either a reader unacquainted with American history or for the well-versed reader, starting with generalities but growing specific with respect to historical figures and events. In each of the seven chapters I learned several historical facts I have somehow not run across before—therefore I’d place myself in the middle of the target audiences for this book.

Several questions raised through the book are essential for writing teachers, therefore I think the book is worth reading for us, for its pedagogical knowledge in its interviews, for its summary of social history, and its history of home technologies. There were several particular issues outstanding in my reading.

Anthony Giddens is referenced a number of times in the work, as follows, citing Giddens’ 1979 concept of the “duality of structure” (32). They cite Giddens’ duality to “to explain how the actions of people are not only shaped by the society within which they live and the technological systems they inhabit but also how they themselves help constitute these environments” (60). Lastly, the trope is repeated in the conclusion. The editors quote Giddens… “who notes that people both shape, and are shaped by, the social systems within which they live in a complex duality of structuration, that ‘every competent member of every society’ (71) not only ‘knows a great deal about the institutions of that society’ (71) but also draws on this understanding of ‘structure, rules, and resources’ (71) to make changes in the surrounding environment” (Selfe & Hawisher 221).

The academic trajectory of the book is one of awe and exploration, and the editors’ continuing relation of the concepts as a ballistic, accelerating trend of computer usage in the home and workplace reminds me of one of Giddens’ final chapters in The Consequences of Modernity, where he refers to the “Juggernaut of Modernity.” He envisions (aesthetic and literature-based) modernity as an uncontrollable beast racing through the streets of cities around the world, crushing all beneath its path with massive wheels, disregarding all humanity before it. Selfe and Hawisher’s study is rather cheerier, but it assumes this same unstoppable beast has citizens of many persuasions clinging to its sides, hoping to reach the frontier of technological modernity rather than finding themselves mashed.

They add the important caveat throughout that technological literacies are not monodimensional (227) and, as all literacies, have limited life-spans (212). In one interview, the availability of technology is directly proportional to the availability of money. Interviewee Janice explains how she and a friend put together a system, “I knew a lot about computers, but he did too and probably more than me because he had more money and everything” (175). A friend of mine in Georgia builds computers cheaply, but it occurs to me only now that the systems he his building were once purchased whole-hog or as components at full-price. Giddens’ duality of structure is posed as a sort of dialectic here: that technology influences society, but society also influences the development of technology. The progress in tandem. The questions left us are these: what do we lose in skills or information as technology progresses, with its many gains, and more importantly, who is left out of these developments as the juggernaut reigns?

For next time, I am interested in how the “trench work” theorists are referenced, and I wonder what might comprised writing in the trenches in the information age, amidst or after the information explosion.