Why Can’t Things Get Worse?

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“I think the state of reading and writing will be *different* in ten years as a result of the Internet. Languages evolve, and established practices for writing evolve; when books were hand-lettered by scribes, they were written very differently than they are now, but it’s hard to make a case that the practice got “worse.” The Internet and associated publishing tools — blogs, Twitter, and the like — may have an accelerating effect on those changes; the art of reading, writing, and rendering knowledge is likely to evolve more quickly than it has in the past, and there are some who would argue that that is a bad thing. I think it will be different; not better, not worse, but not the same.” – Rachel Smith, vice president, New Media Consortium

The Future of the Internet, Part 2: A review of responses to a tension pair about the impact of the internet on reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge.

This idea that literacy will be “different” but not necessarily bad fascinates me for several reasons. The traditional analogy is to the transition from oral to written culture. From the (theoretical) point of view of oral culture, the shift to the printed page was an enormous loss of individual memory, in particular. No one needed to memorize thousands of lines of poetry anymore. From our point of view, it was a huge gain in collective memory. Knowledge would not be lost with the individual. It’s a net win.

Similarly, the idea is that while there will be some loss in the transition from traditional to digital media, the losses will be compensated by the gains. I am not quite sure I buy this argument. Those scribes noted by Smith originally wrote without punctuation, standardized spelling, or capitalization, for example. It’s not just a neutral difference; those standards make both reading and writing more efficient, and so better. If change can result in a net win, it can result in a loss, too.

Predicting the future is never a winning game, but this “difference” argument seems profoundly divorced from contemporary history. “Literacy” is not a fixed concept, it’s a set of skills that persist, among other things, becuase they have real economic efficacy. “Literacy” is a form of cultural capital. In early stages of industrialization, for example, workers don’t need to be literate. Workers might resist by becoming literate on their own, as it were, but capitalist culture won’t encourage it. Not yet.

In later stages of industrialization such as our own, the future is still not quite clear. Many technologies– from icons, to international street signs, to new media– suggest that literacy may no longer be defined in terms of reading and writing per se. (Print could become a form of resistance, too.) Maybe the new literacy will minimize knowledge, in other words. Perhaps only a minority will retain the traditional literacy skills that underwrite power.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing

No Standard Children

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My students always have a hard time writing criticism. The first complaint is that they don’t know enough; that’s not true, of course. They have the assignment, to start, which they can use as criteria. That’s plenty of material in itself, but they also have their own sense of language. It may be difficult to articulate your tastes in writing, but that’s the point. The more you struggle to put things into words, the more you will improve as a writer and a thinker.

Once I get them over that hurdle—sometimes before—their next complaint is that they don’t want to be negative. They want to affirm what’s right as well as explain what’s wrong. The practical-minded curmudgeon in me resists that idea—affirmation is both unnecessary and often unhelpful. In the spirit of compromise, though, I often tell them to affirm first, briefly, and then get on to the criticism. More generally, too, I understand that relentless criticism can be bracing at best and often dispiriting.

In the resisting the curmudgeon spirit, I was happy to read this summary of the proposed changes to No Child Left Behind; a measure often known more simply as No Child left (“Obama to Seek Sweeping Change in ‘No Child’ Law“). Suffice to say that NCLB was a brutal attack on working people and their children. The best part of the proposed changes, to my way of thinking, is the possibility that the new program will embrace what’s called the “Common Core State Standards Initiative.”

The writing standards, in particularly, are refreshingly rich, the opposite of a standardized test. It’s easy to imagine a college admissions process founded in these standards. Teachers, perhaps with the help of students and parents, could create non-reductive narrative assessments. Admission officials, then, with the help of professor’s and staff, could use these narratives to compile diverse freshman classes. It wouldn’t be perfect but it would be a huge improvement.

Posted in: Composition, Language, Professional

@TEOTD

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Every writer has a weakness; mine’s spelling. It’s probably worsened by my sometimes spastic typing skills, and my sometimes sticky keyboard. (My other weakness is eating breakfast sitting here at the computer; bagel crumbs get in everything.) So I was fascinated to hear researchers suggest that texting might in fact teach a certain kind of language awareness that might help students learn to spell (“Phone texting ‘helps pupils to spell“).

I’m not quite sure that Britain and the United States have quite the same context surrounding language in general and learning in particular. I haven’t taught in Britain, but here the problematic use of texting codes is often closely related to an entire complex of issues related to that matrix of ideas that surround identity and authority in schools. In my experience it’s rarely a lack of spelling skill, in other words, and more a matter of resisting what some students consider an alien way of thinking.

That, in turn, may well be related to the sheer mass of media exposure described in another recent report (“Report: Media use by teens, tweens grows to 53 hours a week“).It’s not the media use that worries me– although I’m old fashioned enough to wish that there was more reading– it’s the advertising. I’d like to know how much of this media exposure is accompanied by commercial advertising directed at children. Ads are bad enough for adults; for children they are a disaster.

U.S. advertising is profoundly anti-social because it’s so narcissistic. Education is nothing if not social, and it demands attitudes and skills– putting off rewards, discipline, listening, cooperation– that contradicts (and hopefully partially counters) consumer culture. Children may well be learning important linguistic sensitivities by texting, but they only have the phone in the first place because advertisers convinced them they had to have it. I have to wonder if that dynamic is really helpful.

Posted in: Language, Writing

Open Scientific Writing

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Arguably, we are witnessing the end of one era of academic cultural capital– I’d call it the proprietary era– and the beginning of another, which I think should be called the open era. In the proprietary era status was dependent, in part, on the possession of more or less rare forms of knowledge. The value of knowledge was dependent on keeping it secret until it was made public in a way which ensured that you would receive proper credit.

That’s one of the reasons that academic journals were so important: they were the gateway that allowed proprietary knowledge to become public without any loss of capital. The channels themselves, in fact, conveyed their own institutional cultural capital. It didn’t just matter what you knew, it matters where you worked and where you published. Slowly, though, for reasons that range from the political to the technological to the logistic, all of this is changing.

I don’t think it’s possible to know for sure what the new forms of academic capital will look like; there’s still too much turbulence in the system for any clarity. I think, though, that the open science and open notebook folks are the place to look for signs of the emerging paradigm. As a writing teacher, I am particularly interested in the open notebook projects, since they point to a very new model for audience and purpose in academic writing.

“Open Notebook Science,” Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel writes, “is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded.” It sounds simple, but it’s not; it’s also not as transparent and democratic as it might sound, either. It pushes scientists towards writing notes that others can understand, but that “other” might be other scientists more than the general public. The rest of us can read but may not understand.

How will academic capital change if academics begin to be rewarded for sharing knowledge openly rather than keeping it secret until it can be revealed via the proper channels? “Openness” will itself have to be defined: do we reward most who most fluently speak the technical codes of their disciplines, or do we reward those who find ways to subvert those codes so that science itself becomes more widely accessible? It’s still an open question (pardon the pun).

Posted in: Language, Professional, Writing