Literacy Crisis Rhetorics in the Digital Age

Since I wasn't able to make it to class on Monday, I've posted the notes I planned to present here. What follows is a summary of my reading, as well as some images and quotes pulled from the reading, mixed in with plenty of my own perspective and some questions this reading inspired me to pursue going forward.

Strategic Discourse: The Politics of (New) Literacy Crises

Edited by Lynn C Lewis

“[T]he rhetorical power of the phrase ‘literacy crisis’ resides in its ability to condense a broad range of cultural, social, political, and economic tensions into one central image,” John Trimbur.

Introduction by Lynn C. Lewis

This collection uses as a launching point Justin Timbur’s 1991 essay “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis” which analyzed the political and rhetorical dimensions of ways we talk about “crisis” in general and “literacy crisis” specifically. In the introduction,  Lewis describes talking to Timbur at the 2010 Watson conference. She told him that her graduate students found his book very helpful and he replied “Thank you, but it really needs to be updated.” This book is framed, therefore, as a response to Timbur’s own voiced desire for an update.

In 1991, Timbur was responding to proliferation of the word “crisis” in popular discourse, a term that has lost little steam since then. Think about all the “clickbait” type articles you encounter in your daily life which make reference to some form of crisis affecting society: a health crisis, a cultural

crisis, a financial crisis, a housing crisis, a mental health crisis. Timbur pointed out that “crisis” is a term that is used strategically; so it is important to consider to what strategic ends people invoke the term “literacy crisis”

“ Crisis rhetoric calls to action and, frequently, depends on the invocation of nostalgia... As the contributors to this project will show, nostalgia for the imaginary (un)age wherein students were undistracted, unplagiarist, and culturally literate seesaws with fears of a future in which only experts can write code or the written text is demoted in favor of talking books or basic writers focus on multimodal composing rather than grammar.”

1. “Distracted by Digital Writing: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of Literacy,” by Stacey Pigg

Pigg “ask(s) that we consider what is negotiated with respect to literacy when we portray students as pervasively distracted.”

“ Discourse that identifies a contemporary attention crisis often involves implicit assumptions about literacy in at least two senses: first, it supposes that digital literacy causes distraction, and, second, it proposes that this inability to focus leads to decreased reading and writing abilities in non-digital contexts.”

She demonstrates what she means by “discourse that identifies an attention crisis” by embedding a CNN Dateline video about undergraduate student distraction in the introduction. She returns to this

Throughout the rest of her argument, she returns to this video to analyse the rhetorics of its images and messages. Take for instance the following image:

Pigg points out that these sorts of images often take a sort of “anthropological” standpoint, positioning the viewer as an outside observer and evaluator of a culture that is strange.

“Clearly, we are to read Eliza as other and yet recognizable: an archetype whose commitments we understand because we know people like her. She is our student, our neighbor, our kid.”

I respected the snark that Pigg implemented throughout, poking fun at the more catastrophizing rhetorics of the literacy crisis. “From the idea that first drafts lacking transitions represent a widespread literacy scare to the idea that professors’ memories of writing over the decades represent a valid or reliable measure of decline, there is plenty of room for debate.”

Pigg also asks us to reconsider our concept of “distraction” through a study of a PhD student’s multimodal composing practices. She monitored whenever the student checked her phone, or pulled up another website, stuff like that. She found that:

“Students often spend only seconds with one writing technology or medium before turning to another. However, this movement often 1) represented a way of coping with complex information landscapes, 2) was planned, and 3) resulted in writing performances that students deemed successful.”

2. “The Specter of Internet Plagiarism,” by Stephanie Vie

Vie’s article looks at today’s anxieties surrounding plagiarism in higher education through the lense of plagiarism detection softwares like “Turnitin.com.” She both critically evaluates the rhetorics of Turnitin and makes a case for why we need to be critical of the rhetorics we use when we talk about digital plagiarism.

I found Vie’s use  uses hypertext to provide background very effective. For instance, she links to a brief history of Turnitin in the intro. It appears in another tab, and one can keep that tab pulled up to refer back to while interacting with the rest of the argument.

Vie emphasizes that plagiarism “isn’t black and white,” and indeed never has been. Rather, she explains, plagiarism is a constantly shifting and negotiated moral concept which is tied to both information technologies and “culture bound assumptions about the nature of authorship.”

She explains a fascinating paradox: that the internet both facilitates plagiarism and the detection of plagiarism. Are students really plagiarising more, or is it just easier to plagiarise? When so much information is available digitally, who owns what? How do we protect authorship in citation practices?

“The plagiarism detection service is seen as a technology with the ability not only to assess textual material, but the individual producing that textual material as well; its role is to police and thereby produce docile, moral bodies: those who are right and proper.”

The following graphic is up on the Turnitin.com website. It defines tiers of plagiarism in a way which Vie finds dubious, and which I think I find dubious as well. Thoughts?

3. “Responding to the Proceduary Crisis: From Code Year to Code Decade,” by Kevin Brooks and Chris Lindgren

This piece did some of the coolest stuff with the graphic capacity of digital publishing that I saw out of any. The piece was organized using the following icons, which linked to different parts of the argument. I like that the hyperlinks themselves, pictured below,  looked like computer icons, reinforcing the arguments being made about the evolution of literacy. 

This piece looks at the other side of the declining literacy narrative: rising literacy expectations. That is, the idea that everyone should learn to code, and that those who don’t risk becoming obsolete and unemployable.

Brooks and Lindgren point out that “the digital divide is materially more than access to technology, and that culture is embedded in the design and appropriation of technology.” They expands on this through a discussion  how factors like race, gender, class, and geographical location can affect whether or not a person has the opportunity to learn certain digital literacies.

They also explore a  program they implemented with elementary school age children which used gamified activities to teach coding and digital literacy skills. I’d definitely take a look at it if you have interests in those kinds of pedagogies.

4. “Crisis and Opportunity: Hyperliteracies in the Composition Classroom,” by Justin Young:

Young addresses rhetorics of literacy crisis surrounding specifically the use of cell phones in and approximate to the classroom. Young proposes that educators might find insight in critically examining students’ use of cell phones instead of combatting or ignoring it.

He explores the relationship between students and their cellphones not just from the perspective of potential distraction, but also of anxieties about students’ ability to distinguish between what is appropriate digitally and what is appropriate academically. An example of failing to make this distinction might be using text slang like “u” for “you” in an email sent to a professor.

Young argues that the rhetorics over a “crisis of literacy” runs parallel to anxieties over “crisis of civility” and that these two discourses of crises meet in discussions of cell phones phones and digital language features in the classroom.

“An important question to ask here is whether the outcry and crisis narrative, in the academy and otherwise, that emerges in response to a proliferation of indecorous emails and essays containing text message jargon, is really about concern over a decline in the functional literacy and/or school literacy of young people, or represents, rather, a concern over a decline in the cultural literacy of young people.”

Young conducted a study that found that students did indeed have trouble with genre conventions and audience awareness in email.

A lot of the articles in this chapter question whether there is any kind of technology related literacy crisis happening at all. But Young firmly believes that something is wrong, it’s just not that the very existence of Twitter is making people stupider. Rather, he harkens back to the work of George Lakoff, pointing out how egocentric and affective arguments have come to dominate political discourse. He uses the example of the popularity of the “birther” movement, which, despite lacking any sort of empirical evidence to support its series, was immensely popular before and during Barack Obama’s presidency. Young argues that the egocentric nature of our relationship with our devices and the algorithms that govern digital spaces fosters insular communities in which supporting one’s own opinion and communicating in one’s own discourse style is all that matters.

“It should not come as any great surprise, then, when our students send us messages that lack context or a polite acknowledgement of the receiver, or when beginning college writers fail to consider audience when composing an argument about a political issue. If they follow the example set in our media, the intended audience of any message is already on the same side as the sender—why take the time to provide explanation or niceties?”

5. “Made to be Broken/Broken to be Made,” by Benjamin Smith

Another work that explores the “coding crisis” as an extension of the literacy crisis,  argues that literacy is not necessarily in decline, but that it is shifting, and that this shift generates anxieties about what is being lost in the shift.

Part of Smith’s argument hinges around the concept of the “digital native” a character that, at least implicitly, is involved in every chapter of this book. Smith writes of “the digital native.”

“Students immersed in the digital age navigate the well-worn geographies of online communities; for them, they are every bit as real as their homes, the colleges, and the cities and towns they’ve grown up in. It stands to reason that just like their homes and their physical communities, online terrain contains the same kind of meaning for students.”

As a digital native, I’m not sure I agree with this. I’m also reminded of the strange temporal whiplash I always get from reading these types of pieces. They mention the “digital native.” I picture the undergraduates I work with in the writing lab, or I picture some stereotype of a highschool kid on instagram. Then I remember: this book was published in 2015. The ideas for these studies and articles probably began to germinate before that. In 2015, I was an undergraduate sophomore. I was just two years out of highschool. Scholarship about digital natives is scholarship about me. When it’s myself and my peer group being studied rather than some amorphous, unknowable population of near cyborg teenagers, things can look a little different. I wonder if people consider, when making speculations  

about digital natives, how fast a teenager grows up, the relatively short amount of time it will take their digitally distracted, culturally alien students to grow into their coworkers.   I wonder if there is work to be done in looking at the rhetorics of how “digital natives” are conceived of temporally and as agents in popular and academic discourse.

6. “Listening as Literacy: Notes from the Braille Literacy Crisis,” by Melissa Helquist

7. “Politics of Remediation,” by Lynn Reid

The last two pieces were interesting, but they don’t apply as broadly to class topics, so I’m not going to get into them in detail here.  You should read them if you’re interested in disability studies, or in studying basic writing, great sources about the politics of literacy crises in these areas.

Afterword: “Revisiting ‘Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis’ in the Era of Neoliberalism by John Trimbur

John Timbur himself returns in the afterword, to bring a very sobering material and economic approach to the ideas explored within the collection. He points out that the literacy crisis is related to anxieties concerning the future of higher education an ever increasing class divide. He argues that trying to assuage these anxieties through pedagogy alone won’t cut it. We won’t fix an economic issue with think-pieces.