Is Literate Lives Readable?

Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States by Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher catalogues 20 oral histories of computer use.

Primary Thesis: “[W]e hope to emphasize the importance of context—how particular historical periods, cultural milieus, and material conditions affected people’s acquisition of the literacies of technology”(7).

Problems:

Because the sampling of writing instructors and computer workers isn't representative, Selfe and Hawisher admit that making wider points about computer use is near impossible.

That leads to many obvious assertions, mostly about how our contexts influence who we are.


Some of the oral histories are compelling. They allow the participants to be co-authors which adds an interesting dynamic and its own set of problems.

Collaborative writing issues?

To what extent does collaborative writing keep our most provocative arguments at bay and lead to easily agreed-upon truisms?

Chapter One. The oral history of Damon Davis, a student who struggled in class but excelled at designing websites, gives us a taste of what the authors value. They write, “Damon chose not to subscribe [. . .] to the conventional print literacy values and practices” (54). They generalize this point later.


Chapter Two. Selfe and Hawisher include the stories of three women—Mary, Paula, and Karen—born in the 1960s, and remind us again of the radical changes that computers have made: “We suspect that with this generation, for the first time in our history, literacy practices became inextricably and irrevocably tied to computers and one’s ability to make them work” (26).

Chapter focuses on gender.

Interesting definition of literacy points to the social activism instincts of the authors:
“If we define literacy as the power to enact change in the world, we cannot—must not—ignore the women, and men, who struggle to come to literacy in the information age” (82).


Chapter Three introduces the idea of “technological gateways” (26). For the authors, these are progressive “sites and occasions for acquiring digital literacies but vary across people's experiences and the times and circumstances in which they grew up” (26).

Race and poverty are factors here.
Curiously, some of the participants, including Carmen, remain anonymous. Some sensitive information.

Chapter Four holds much of the same but does include a debate about the ways computers unify us versus the way they divide us.

Tom Lugo says, “I hate—this is one reason why I don’t think I’ll ever use the Web for a lot of research—I hate just staring at the screen. I want to have something in my hands” (123). He believes he speaks to his family and friends less because of computers, as well.

Another woman, Melissa, “participates enthusiastically in online worlds, constructing community and meaningful relations through written, online exchanges” (128).

The authors seem to side with Melissa.

Chapter Five. In the most compelling set of oral histories, three Black women from the same family but of different generations describe their experiences with computers. The authors write, “Although these stories should, in an ideal world, outline a narrative of promise, of steadily improving conditions for the practice of literacy in general, and digital literacy, more specifically, they do not” (133).

Public schools are indicted in this chapter.

Access is not the only problem. Teachers must be trained and must actively use technology in classes to promote media literacy.

The theme of Chapter Six is that, in Deboarah Brandt’s words, “Literacy is always in flux” (181). To illustrate this, Selfe and Hawisher include the stories of three women who came of age in the sixties. These stories help them to draw a parallel between movements of social change and revolutionary movements of literacy.

Chapter Seven: The Future of Literacy.

Selfe and Hawisher (let's call them Hawisher and Selfe for once) finally ask the big questions near the end of the book. Where are we going and How do we get there?:

They want to show us the best of what can be done on the Internet if young people have the appropriate training. They employ extreme examples of people with vast technological literacy in this final chapter.

*Secondary Thesis*: “[I]t is clear that [young participants] consider the reading and composing skills they acquired informally in electronic environments—literacies marked by the kinesthetic, the visual, the navigational, the intercultural; by a robust combination of code, image, sound, animation, and words—to be far more compelling, far more germane to their future success than the more traditional literacy instruction they have received in school” (205).

This is the book's strongest point. But it troubles me. It undervalues a literacy—book reading—marked by the imaginative. It suggests that without all stimulation, there is no stimulation. And it unrealistically relies on the example of astoundingly bright students who has already mastered baseline literacies.

Final evaluation: This is by no means a great book—bogged in truism as it is—but Selfe and Hawisher valuably ask us to remember how quickly computer technology has developed, how thrillingly it opens its gateways, and how, chillingly, those opportunities remain out of reach for so many.