How do we get from Digital Literacy to Open Access?
Two concepts within the field of computers and writing which are important in the larger national and global discourse as well as in the writing classroom are digital literacy and open access. Even if not named explicitly, digital literacy is what we are talking about when we despair of our paranoid uncle circulating counterfactual political memes; it's what we talk about when we talk about "post-truth." Even if not named explicitly, Open Access is what we talk about when we complain that we can't watch old episodes of The Simpsons on any legal streaming platform; it is what we talk about when we talk about the impracticality of buying a textbook we will only use once, when most of the information within the book can also be found somewhere online. Within the writing classroom, and within computers and writing scholarship, we see these same issues contested in less casual terms.
Digital literacy issues and open access issues are often depicted as rather distant from each other in the geography of computers and writing. Digital literacy is often associated with issues of the cultural and the pedagogical while Open Access is typically explained as associated with the more technical wing of the field. But these two topics are actually connected by many of the same overarching concepts, such as generational anxieties and issues of accessibility. Furthermore, the future of Open Access has powerful implications for the future of digital literacy.
The discussion of digital literacy and digitally facilitated information literacy skills is often tied to anxieties and rhetorics of crisis. In his influential 1991 essay “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis,” John Trimbur wrote: “[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.” (Qtd in Lewis, “Introduction,” Strategic Discourse). Writing in the 1990s, Timbur identified the technologically expedited of shifting traditional social and economic power structures as the catalyst for anxious discourses surrounding the "literacy crisis." At the time of his writing, the digital revolution had just begun. Since then, anxieties surrounding technology's effect on literacy practices have continued to emerge, keeping pace with the rapid advancements of communication technologies.
As Stacey Pigg observes in “Distracted by Digital Literacy: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of digital Literacy” “ a changed embodiment or habitus associated with digital reading and writing is often positioned both as evidence of literacy decline.” That is, it is clear that the Millennial and Gen Z generations compose and communicate differently than their parents did, with the aid of handheld devices, with the ubiquitous presence of multimedia possibilities, and with the wealth of information available on the internet; this generates an anxiety that these different literacy practices are not just different but also degraded. Pigg points to examples of popular media which examine the “literacy crisis” caused on college campuses by the ubiquity of digital devices, like a CNN Dateline segment titled “Distracted by Everything.” She describes how these sorts of discourse position “digital natives” under an anthropological lense, depicting them as an “other” that is at once familiar and threatening. Anxieties surrounding the literary practices of digital natives, Pigg explains, give voice to concerns that technology is transforming not only the writing but the thinking of these generations, turning today’s youth into fundamentally different beings. These anxious perspective, while entertaining, are not particularly useful. After all, there’s no turning back the technological clock, and even if we could, Lynn C. Lews argues, we wouldn’t find a perfect platonic idea of literacy practices. Name writes that anxieties surrounding a digital literacy crisis tend to view the past through rose colored glasses, and are characterized by a “nostalgia for the imaginary (un)age wherein students were undistracted, plagiarist, and culturally literate” (Strategic Discourse: The Politics of [New] Literacy Crises).
However, not all concerns over digital literacy are paranoid or unrealistic. Kathleen Blake Yancey points out that there are some rather unsettling implications to the way the circulation of information has changed post-digital revolution. She writes that information literacy practices have “gone from a formalized...system with human interpreters to an ecology constituted of the valuable and the incredible” (“Creating and Exploring New Worlds: Web 2.0, Information Literacy, and the Ways we Know,” 90). This returns us to the literacy practices of your annoying uncle on facebook, the literacy practices generated by a forum in which “facts, data, personal narrative, rumors, information, and misinformation, all inhabiting the same sphere, each info bit circulating as though it carried the same value as all the others” (Yancey, 90.) In “Crisis and Opportunity: Hyperliteracies in the Composition Classroom,” Justin Young argues that the troubling information literacy practices exhibited by the most annoying people on your facebook timeline have implications for the classroom as well. He harkens back to the work of George Lakoff, pointing out how egocentric and affective arguments have come to dominate popular political political discourse. To illustrate this claim, he uses the example of the popularity of the “birther” movement, which, despite lacking any sort of evidence to its credit, was immensely popular before and during Barack Obama’s presidency and affected the political discourse at large. He points out that the birther movement gained traction through digital virality before it gained mainstream media traction, and argues that out egocentric relationship with our digital devices and the personalized algorithms which curate our digital spaces foster insular discourse communities. He argues that in the classroom, these sort of digital discourse practices may manifest as students being unwilling to consider sources or styles of writing which do not explicitly bolster their identity-driven discourse styles. While I think that Young does to some degree fall into the trap of generational apocalypticism, I think he is onto something. I think we all must be wary of the way data driven algorithms mirror our own personalities and preferences back at us, potentially fostering bias and and bypassing of critical thinking which could easily damage the legitimacy of academic literacy practices.
The same anxieties surrounding the legitimacy of knowledge color debates over Open Access as well. The publishing industry is a massively powerful force which permeates every part of the culture of academia and the construction of academic knowledge. Just as emergent digital literacy practices threaten the traditional systems of power held in place, the emergent potential for making knowledge open access through digital technologies threatens these systems of power, and the systems of labor which uphold them. Peter Suber writes in Open Access that academics “donate time, labor and public money to create new knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses that believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge” (38). Open Access raises the question of whether all that “time, labor, alnd money” contributed to the greater good, and it can be an uncomfortable question to grapple with. Suber points out that anxieties about the potential destabilizing of traditional academic systems of labor and power contribute to the formation of misconceptions about what Open Access is; for instance, people mistakenly assume that OA will bypass peer review, delegitimizing the knowledge-making process. These anxieties about the delegitimization of knowledge construction are similar to anxieties about the digital literacy practices of young people. All of these fears can be read as a reaction to the profound shifts in being which we are undergoing as a result of technological advancement; they can be read as fears that we will lose our humanity, or our ability to distinguish the real from the unreal.
Issues of accessibility and power are two other concepts within the field of Computers and Writing which affect both conversations surrounding digital literacy and conversations surrounding open access. It is important to remember that the very existence of these conversations in American academia is dependent on all sorts of privilege. There are lots of groups of people in the world without access to either the internet or to higher education, and for these populations, hand-wringing about the way twitter threatens traditional academic discourse probably wouldn’t be particularly relevant. At the same time, digital communication technologies are spreading across the globe rapidly, and it is important to consider the corporate powers which stand to benefit from this expansion.
When it comes to digital literacy, the implications for accessibility is clear: populations with less access to technology will not develop digital literacy skills, or may develop them more slowly. Privileged communities who have had internet access for a couple decades have participated in the construction of a digital code of credibility building and savvy media consumption. When the internet comes to underserved communities who have not previously had access, the people in those communities have no familiarity with these constructed forms of literacy. Therefore, they may be more susceptible to trusting digital information which is biased, manipulative, or otherwise unreliable. As Kein Brooks and Chris Lindgren point out “the digital divide is materially more than access to technology, and that culture is embedded in the design and appropriation of technology” (“Responding to the Proceduracy Crisis: from Code Year to Code Decade). They explain that all manner of factors can affect whether or not a person has the opportunity to learn certain digital literacies, like race, gender, age, class, government censorship, disability, and geographical location. This has implications for the classroom: our students come from diverse backgrounds, and we cannot assume them all to be pre-equipped with the digital literacy skills which have been afforded to us.
Accessibility matters to open access in a big way; it could be argued that the debate over open access is at its root a debate about accessibility. The full implications of this can be distant for those of us affiliated with large Western research universities of substantial endowment, but Suber reminds us that “in 2008, Harvard subscribed to 98,900 serials and Yale to 73,900. The best-funded research library in India, at the Indian Institute of Science, subscribed to 10,600. Several sub-Saharan African university libraries subscribed to zero”(30). Furthermore, he writes that, “even the wealthiest libraries in the world suffer serious access gaps” such as censorship, language, connectivity, and disability (Suber, 26). Luckily, “knowledge is non-rivalrous. We can share it without dividing it and share it without diminishing it” (Suber, 44). If all of the academic knowledge now kept in physical archives or behind paywalled journals was tomorrow magically digitized into open access content, not all but many of these barriers to access would be dissolved. A bedridden person in Kentucky could access the archives of the V&A. Research published in English could be translated into any other language and released in countries where those languages are spoken.
Suber makes the wry observation that “money would fix issues of access if we had enough of it” (41). This quip holds true for digital literacy accessibility issues as well as the distribution of academic knowledge. If “we,” that is, academics with a belief in the fundamental value of knowledge and a moral interest in the perpetuation of legitimate knowledge-making practices, had enough money to bring an Open Access internet to every person on the planet, while not all of the problems would be solved, we would at least be starting from a much more level playing field of literacy. However, since “we” can’t monetarily affect the way digital knowledge-making is practiced, it is worth taking a look at those who can.
There are immense corporate interests which can impact the future of both digital literacy and OA, most obvious among them the interests of textbook publishers. The manner in which the interest of these corporations affects the discourse over OA is obvious: publishing companies make immense profit from the status quo, and they will oppose changes to this status quo, even if it means less people have access to knowledge. Corporate interests problematize digital literacy issues as well, but in a less obvious way. Tech corporations do not rely on a maintenance of the status quo for revenue, and in fact can profit off of bringing access to the internet to more people. However, it is important to question their motivations for doing so. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal made clear, there are immense political implications for the way user generated online data is used. Powerful institutions and corporations have a lot to gain from targeting their messages to the specific data preferences of individuals and populations. These interests impact the digital literacy practices of populations with internet access. Though bringing access to online information to underserved populations is an objective good, we also need to remain critical of the corporations which are responsible for expanding this technology. Access does not guarantee digital literacy, especially when the goal of providing access is generating profit for wealthy corporations, or data for political or surveillance interests. Whether corporations are blocking or promoting access to information, a critical attitude towards corporate interest is necessary when considering issues of online knowledge construction and distribution.
Ultimately, digital literacy issues and Open Access issues are not only connected by larger themes within the field of computers and writings. They are also connected by the possibility for Open Access to be a solution to problems with digital literacy. Suber eloquently describes this potentiality, writing “Lay readers surfing the internet are easily misled by unsupported claims, refuted theories, anecdotal evidence, and quack remedies. Even if true, however, it’s an argument for rather than against expanding online access to peer-reviewed research”(117).
Open Access could make digital research easier for students, and the research practices of students less frustrating to their professors. Investigations into undergraduate composition sources demonstrate that when students conduct a digital research, they tend to rely on the easiest to find and most frequently occuring sources (Wojahn et al., “Understanding and Using Sources: Student Practices and Perceptions). There has been a lot on research on how educators might most efficiently coax their undergraduates away from such practices, but I would argue that more Open Access libraries and archives would on its own clear up a lot of these difficulties.
Applied more broadly, the ideologies behind Open Access can also be used as a tool to combat the problematic effects ego-centric data networks on digital literacy practices. As it stands, data algorithms are almost always black boxes. We know that our data is being used to determine what we see and do not see online, but we don’t get to know how that data is being used. It is probably uselessly utopian of me, but I can’t help but think that if we had “Open Access” to the exact nature of how our online data is used, this would create immense progress towards a digitally literate future. Though this utopia of algorithmic OA shows very little sign of materializing, steps are at least being taken to foster digital literacy through awareness of the way data algorithms function. Estee Beck, for instance, argues that it is “up to educators” to mold students who are aware of, and can perhaps “subvert” these practices (“Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Information Age,” 38). Beck writes “If users are unaware of this type of algorithmic persuasion occurrence in Facebook and in other websites, information literacies efforts led by librarians, for example, become hindered because people are unable to access, evaluate, and use diverse knowledge bases to form a more democratic digital and real-life society” (48).
Beck’s approach is a great starting point, but I think that pedagogically we can go a little further. Lawrence Lessig writes that “it is clear that the current use of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators that enacted copyright law,”(Free Culture, 140). He reminds his readers that the current state of America copyright was not predestined, but rather determined through a centuries long entanglement of personal, public, and corporate interests. Many people are ignorant of copyright law's controversial history. Students born in the digital era might simply assume that all knowledge and media is property that they must earn their access to. As educators, one way we can foster the development of an empowered digitally literate citizenry is to teach students that it does not have to be this way, that there are people out there who believe everyone has the right to all digitally archived knowledge and that they too can call for this right. Sure, it's important for students to understand the realities of the systems in which they research, but I believe their research practices might grow more dynamic if they saw themselves as agents with the potential to initiate change to these systems.
Zooming out from the classroom, if more people knew what personalized algorithms were bringing them their data, they might be more likely to think critically about their news sources. Or not. We’ll never know if things continue like they’re continuing. Assuming things do continue on this trajectory, the data algorithms which govern our experience of the web will only grow more complex and further from the technical comprehension of the average person. The students we teach will have less and less familiarity with the means by which information is brought to them; we will have less and less familiarity with the means by which information is brought to our students, and to us. Advocating for Open Access and data transparency is one way to attempt to combat the worrying forces of “post truth” and get everyone on the “same page” about information literacy.
Works Cited
Beck, Estee. “Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: the Rhetoric
of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance,” Social Writings/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies, edited by Douglas M. Walls and Stephanie Vie, WAC Clearinghouse, 2017, pp. 38-51. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/social/
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York, Penguin, 2004.
Lewis, Lynn C. “Introduction.” Strategic Discourse, the Politics of the New Literacy Crisis, edited
by Lynn Lewis, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/strategic/.
Pigg, Stacey. “Distracted by Digital Writing: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of Digital Literacy.”
Strategic Discourse, the Politics of the New Literacy Crisis, edited by Lynn Lewis, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/strategic/.
Suber, Peter. Open Access. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2012.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Creating and Exploring New Worlds: Web 2.0, Information
Literacy, and the Ways we Know,” Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration Across Disciplines, edited by Barbara D’Angelo, Sandra Jamieson, Barry Maid, and Janice R. Walker, WAC Clearinghouse, 2016, pp. 77-91.
Young, Justin. “Crisis and Opportunity: Hyperliteracies in the Composition Classroom.”
Strategic Discourse, the Politics of the New Literacy Crisis, edited by Lynn Lewis, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/strategic/.
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