CRITICAL LITERACY AND DIGITAL TEXTS

CRITICAL LITERACY AND DIGITAL TEXTS Michael Peters

Department of Education Auckland University

Colin Lankshear School of Language and Literacy Education

Queensland University of Technology

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1960s, numerous authors working in a range of fields, including the philosophy of technology and literacy studies, have linked what they identify as different periods of history with epochal technology breaks. These include: the evolution of writing within cultural contexts hitherto confined to the orality of face to face communication; the monastic illuminated manuscript; the movable type of the Gutenberg era; and, most recently, the emergent age of electronic communication and digital text.’

The various periods of human history thus identified have been characterized by changes in communication based around new modes of language and changing conceptions of the text. Theorizations of periods of human history, such as ”the mode of information” or “the second media age,” conceptualize changes in the presentation and organization of knowledge and, to that extent, changing sets of social practices which may loosely be described in terms of shifting “forms of cultural life . ’n

Within poststructuralist theory, for example, writers have begun to theorize changes in text production and distribution along lines indicating how such changes have been accompanied by changes in modes of subjectivity and identity formation.

1. See Jack Goody, ed. Literacy in Traditional Societies [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Universlty Press, 1986); jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present [London: Yale University Press, 1986); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o f Typographic Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: Studies in the Evolution of Conciousness (London: Methuen, 1982); Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History o f Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991); Bill Green and Chris Bigum, ”Hypermedia or Media Hype! New technologies and the Future of Litcracy Education,” in The Literacy Lexicon, ed. Michele Anstey and Geoff Bull [Sydney: Prentlce Hall, in press); George Landow and Paul Delany, The Digital Word: Text-Bused Computing in the Humanities [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Jean-FranCois Lyotard, The Postmoderu Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Goeff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

2. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructualism and Social Context (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) and Mark Poster, “The Second Media Age,” Arena 3 (1994): 49-92.

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This is not a matter of technological innovation and change driving or causing these other, larger changes. Theorists such as Michel Foucault theorize “epochal breaks” as deep changes in an episteme or a r ~ h e . ~ The fact remains, however, that these “deeper changes” are at least partly characterized by - and occur in conjunction with - technological innovations and changes affecting the production, construction, distribution, and reception of texts within the large and complex dialectics of cultural practice and historical p roces~ .~ If we take this line of argument seriously, these historical shifts in text production and distribution must be seen also as changes in the material conditions of social practices of all kinds.

Myriad scholarly and theoretical interests intersect here. For the contemporary period we find numerous accounts of how the nature and conduct of work has been transformed globally by electronic technologies in conjunction with other forces, such as shifts in corporate and government policies and national purposes, the emergence of new trading blocs, and so on. Similarly, within the educational literature more specifically, growing numbers of writers are documenting the dynamics of technological innovation in contexts of classroom practice and teacher w0rk.j Nearer to our immediate interest here are accounts of and questions about the extent and manner in which emergent technologies are associated with the evolution of new conceptions and practices of language and literacy, and how extant educational values and practices may encourage or discourage the use of these new “tools” in new ways.

This essay will explore in a preliminary way some possibilities for enlarging and enhancing conceptions and practices of critical literacy through the reflective appropriation of electronic technologies.

Starting, perhaps, with Paulo Freire in the 1960s, the nascent tradition of critical literacy has drawn our attention to the illusory finitude and fixity of books and has

3 . See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York Pantheon, 1972); Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and intro., Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon [New York: Pantheon, 19801; and Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

4. See Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts [Chicago: Thc University of Chicago Press, 19931; and Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.

5. See Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986); David Cohen, “Educational Technology, Policy, and Practice,” Educationul Evaluntion and Policy Analysis 9 (Summer 1987): 153-70; Stcven Hodas, ”Technology Refusal and thc Organizational Culture of Schools,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 1, no. 10 ( I 9931; Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Lewis Perelman, School’s Out: A Radical New Formula for the Revitalization of America’s Educa- tional System [New York: Avon Books, 1992).

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MICHAEL PETERS is Senior Lecturer, Department of Education, University of Auckland, Prlvate Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. His primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education, poststructuralism, and policy studies in education.

COLIN LANKSHEAR is Associate Professor in the School of Language andLiteracy Education, Queensland University of Technology-Kelvin Grove, Victoria Park Road, Locked Bag No, 2, Red Hill, Queensland 4059, Australia. His primary areas of scholarship arc philosophy of education, language and literacy education, and thc politics of education.

PETERS AND LANKSHEAR Critical Literacy and Digital Texts 53

emphasized textual practice as merely one set contiguous with a larger context of social relations. Critical investigation of the “Word” in relation to the “World” has also helped to heighten awareness that reality is not a separate static entity or a transcendent immutable “given” but, rather, something dynamic that we constitute through our encoding and decoding of everyday practice:

Various initiatives of critical literacy have been attempts to demonstrate this “truth” in opposition to prevailing fixed enclosures of the book, the classroom, and larger curriculum structures which, to employ Michael Heim’s metaphor, nest each within the other like a series of Chinese boxes.’ For example, we may see the typical enclosed classroom operating on a surveillance grid which maps educational space in ways that both individualize and normalize.R Likewise, the book can be seen as an enclosure of space. A left-right, top-down, beginning-end set of orientations orga- nizes the book economy of writing space.9 Consciousness based on these models is also enclosed, in the sense that it is spatialized to accommodate these cultural norms and preferences. From this standpoint, reading and writing critically have emerged as counterpractices in response to neat and fixed categories that assume a reified presence as they take on material forms in human practice - categories that mystify the nature and conditions of human life and, in the same process, effectively foreclose possibilities for different modes of being or becoming.

We will argue that the current transition from print-based texts to electronic text forms and practices, which is continuing apace, opens up space for expanded and enhanced practices of critical literacy. We regard this as a matter, simultaneously, of educational urgency and possibility. Our prevailing “enclosured” forms of consciousness may impede a fuller realization of critical literacy within this changing textual environment. One problem here is that new information and communications technologies already show clear signs of being treated like any other texts within the same spaces of educational enclosure. Another is that teachers and educationists simply are not able to keep abreast of - let alone ahead of - these rapidly changing technological, communications, and related social and cultural developments, and so are unable to develop pedagogies equal to the learning demands of the time.

We do not seek here to break significant new ground in the philosophy of technology or theory of “cyberspace.” Neither do we herald, still less develop, entirely new constructions of critical literacy. Our goal is modest. We aim to make a case that will encourage teachers and other educationists who are interested in the possibilities for classroom-based practices of critical literacy to explore the potential

6. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy ofthe Oppressed (New York Seabury, 1970); Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury, 1973); Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (London: MacMillan, 1985); and Paulo Freire and Donald0 Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (New York: Bergin and Gamey, 1987).

7. See Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16.

8. Compare Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthePrison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, Allen Lane, 1977).

9. Bolter, Writing Space.

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for appropriating new technologies into their pedagogy in better-informed ways. In doing so, we aim to bring some novel insights to the theme of critical literacy.

The essay develops through three sections. The first advances a generic account of critical literacy, while recognizing the diverse theoretical and pedagogical constructions of critical literacy that currently exist. The second draws on an already large literature to investigate in a preliminary way how modernist enclosures of the text, and educational practices associated with them, may be thrown into question in “cyberspace,” where the shift from book to screen involves a redefinition of what counts as text. The final section considers some implications and possibilities for critical literacy in cyberspace.

AN ACCOUNT OF CRITICAL LITERACY

Among the growing numbers of educationists who seem to agree on the importance of promoting critical literacy as a key educational goal, agreement is often more apparent than real. Even the most cursory survey of contemporary educational theories and pedagogies reveals quite different approaches to critical literacy, ranging across “reader affective response to literary texts,” “higher order skills with texts,” “liberal rationalist” constructions of reading and writing, “critical pedagogy” or “Freirean” approaches, “discourse analytic approaches,” as well as approaches derived from systemic functional linguistics, and from the gamut of poststructuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial framings of textuality and “deconstruction.”’O

We take the view here that “critical literacy” does not name some finite established entity but, rather, implies broadly that standards or criteria exist on the basis of which we may distinguish critical conceptions and practices of reading, writing, or viewing texts from non-critical or a-critical literacies. At a general level, we regard two aspects as necessary to any critical orientation. First, there is the element of evaluation or judgment. Second, there is the requirement of knowing closely and “for what it is” that which is being evaluated: the object of evaluation or judgment. To critique X - that is to judge or evaluate something positively or negatively - is to comment on its qualities or merits; this requires identifying them through some kind of analysis.

These two generic “moments” of critique are readily apparent, for example, in Peter McLaren’s conception of critical pedagogy. Insofar as schooling itself com- prises the object of critique, critical pedagogy is grounded in an analysis of schooling as a form of cultural politics. That is, schooling “always represents an introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life.”” Furthermore, schooling always involves power relations, social practices, and privileged forms of

10. See Gunther Kress, Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice [Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1985); Jim Martin, Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality(Gee1ong: Deakin University Press, 1985); and Wendy Morgan, A Poststructuralist English Classroom: The Example of Ned Kelly (Melbourne: Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, 1992). 11. Peter McLaren, Life in Schools [New York: Longman, 1989), 160; see also Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).

PETERS AND LANKSHEAR Critical Literacv and Digital Texts 55

knowledge “that support a specific vision of past, present and future,’’ and “rational- ize the knowledge industry” in ways that “reproduce inequality, racism and sexism [and] fragment democratic social relations’’ by emphasizing “competitiveness and cultural ethnocentrism.”12 In response to the cultural politics of schooling, critical pedagogy engages students and teachers together in making explicit the socially constructed character of knowledge, and asking in whose interests particular “knowledges” are thus constructed. In accordance with an analysis that is grounded in a theory of schooling as a form of cultural politics, and in accordance with detailed findings derived in the analysis, we might advance a substantive evaluation or judgment of schooling in general, or of particular cases and aspects of schooling that exemplify the larger cultural politics in question.

So far as the object of critique is concerned, Catherine Wallace’s distinction between critical realng as a matter of “responding to particular texts” versus critical reading as involving “awareness.. .of what reading itself is,”13 suggests that critical literacy might involve any or all of the following:

(a] having a critical perspective on literacy or literacies per se; (b) having a critical perspective on particular texts; (c) having a critical perspective on - that is, being able to make “critical readings” of - wider social practices, arrangements, relations, allocations, procedures, and so on, which are mediated, made possible, and partially sus- tained through reading, writing, viewing, or transmitting texts. The first of these “foci” (for want of a better label) of critical literacy may be

construed in terms of having a “meta-level understanding” of literacy, or particular literacies, as social practice.I4 That is, to know literacy for what “it is.” Of course, accounts of “what it is” are necessarily informed by some theory or other and will be contentious. Many, though not all, literacy scholars and educationists who espouse a critical perspective, conceive literacy - and, indeed, language generally - as an inherent component of discourse, where discourses are understood as being inescapably value-laden, power-ridden, and interest- or purpose-serving. For them, literacy is irredeemably ideological and implicated in creating and maintaining social hierarchies, differences, advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, all literacy, like all discourse, is historically contingent, socially constructed and, to that extent, transformable. We broadly share this view, according to which acting transformatively on literacy will, to a greater or lesser extent, be acting on discourse.

In this vein, Gary Anderson and Patricia Irvine report a case of West Indian student speakers of a Creole dialect analyzing their own literacy in relation to the standard form of English, and arriving at informed judgments about how these literacies were operating within their social milieu and how within different

12. Ibid., 161.

13. See Catherine Wallace, ”Critical Language Awareness in the EFL Classroom,” in Critical Language Awareness, ed. Norman Fairclough (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 59-92.

14. James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics a n d Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (London: Falmer Press, 1990) and James Paul Gee, “What is Literacy!” in Rewriting Literacy, ed. Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler (New York: Bergin and Gamey, 19911, 1-11.

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domains these different literacies could be “powerful,” suited to meeting particular purpose^.'^ The study occurred within a context of tensions between West Indian Creole dialects and Standard English involving students at the University of the Virgin Islands. The students involved channeled their anger at being assigned to a noncredit remedial English class into a critical investigation of language and dialects, discovering in the process much about the politics of dominance and subordination mediated by standard and nonstandard dialects. Focusing on their own shared belief that they spoke “broken English,” they studied linguistics, encouraged by a West Indian linguist who advanced concepts and evidence affirming Creole as a [genuine) language. The students experimented with writing essays in Creole, discovering that

composingan essay is difficult in any language. In the process they had to agree on which of their varieties of Creole would be the standard for creating an orthography, and discovered the reasons for conventions in standard English at the same time. Their sociolinguistic research documented which settings and topics [under existing norms and conventions] called for Creole and which for standard English.16

The fruits of this critical investigation of dialects changed student language practices in class and out of class. Students learned that the choice of dialect is more than a matter of simply choosing a formal code, but includes as well choices about “the social uses and values associated with different forms (essays, letters, or songs) and the audiences and purposes for the intended ....p roducts. Also, the choice depends on students’ educational goal^."^' Thereafter, these students in honors and remedial classes wrote consciously in a variety of genres: using standard English for research papers or letters to editors; Creole for fictional stories addressed to other West Indians on themes of shared interest or for letters of thanks to guest speakers from the community; and so on.

The second and third “foci” of critical literacy in theory and practice identified above relate more specifically to texts. Insights provided by Gunther Kress and James Gee are helpful here. Kress argues that so far as we are interested in language from a sociocultural rather than a merely formalistic perspective, texts comprise the “relevant units of language.” Furthermore,

the forms and meanings of texts are determined by discourses - systems of meanings rising out of the organisation of social institutions - and by genres - formal conventional categories whosemeanings andformsariseout of themeanings, forms andfunctionsof the conventionalised occasions of social interactions. Clearly, both of these sources of the forms and meanings of texts are entirely social and cultural.18

Humans give and receive textual meanings in a range of settings and in generic ways. We are, moreover, formed discursively as givers and takers of textual meaning. We become givers and receivers of meaning in virtue of our accumulated experience of discourses.

15. Gary Anderson and Patricia Irvine, “Informing Critical Literacy with Ethnography,” in Critical Literacy: Politics. Praxis and the Postmodern, ed. Colin Lankshear and Peter McLaren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 19931, 81-104.

16. Anderson and Irvine, “Informing Critical Literacy,” 94-95.

17. Ibid., 96

18. Gunther Kress, Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice, 31.

PETERS AND LANKSHEAR Critical Litcracy and Digital Texts 57

It is also helpful here to employ a distinction used by James Gee between Discourse and disco~rse.’~ Discourse, with a capital “D,” refers to social practices which amount to “ways of being in the world” (for example, being a teacher, being a Catholic, being a linguist, being a feminist]; discourse, with a lower case “d,” refers to the language (saying, listening, reading, writing, viewing) components of a Discourse. There is no Discourse without discourse, and vice versa; they simultaneously form and inform each other. All literacies are embedded in Discourses. Thus specific texts, understood as sociocultural phenomena, are simultaneously more or less specific “chunks” of discourse, or moves within a Discourse, and ”exemplifica- tions” of, or “participations in,” the character of the Discourse as a whole. This distinction, between “a chunk of Discourse” and “exemplification of a larger discursive logic,” distinguishes the second and third “foci” noted above.

Allan Luke’s account of speech and “speech events” speaks to this point as well. Luke notes that speech is not developed in isolation, or in some pure form. Rather, learning to speak

entails learning, negotiating and contesting ways of conducting social relations with elders, siblings and other community members. Language use occurs in houndaried speech events. These events are not random or arbitrary, hut are rule governed and structured. Although they may seem spontaneous, events such as mealtime conversations, ordering in a restaurant, the rituals of preparing for bedtime and telephone conversations follow identifiable protocols and patterns: some topics and kinds of language are acceptable, particular social roles and relationships are called into play. Hence, for a child, learning how to participate in a mealtime conversation requires apprenticing at a set of rules that govern who can nominate which topics, how to get the floor, what kinds of gestures can and can’t he made, when and who can interrupt whom, who has the final ”word,” where slang and profanity might be appropriate, even volume levels. The rules and conventions mark out what the philosopher Wittgenstein called “language games.”2o

From this perspective, texts can be approached critically under two descriptions: as discrete moves within some language game or other within a Discourse and as productions which participate in the ”logic” of the Discourse as a whole. To pursue a critical perspective on particular texts involves analyzing and responding evaluatively to a text in terms of what it “does” within a language game. To read critically in the wider sense of making critical readings of Discourses is to respond to a particular text as an embodiment of a larger discursive logic.

An example may help here. At the height of the disastrous famine in Somalia in 1992 a front page story appeared in The Australian, Australia’s only national daily newspaper.21 The brief story was accompanied by a large photograph showing “a starving child wait[ing] to die in the dust of Somalia.” The photograph was the quintessence of pathos. The story itself contained eight short paragraphs informing readers that in the grip of Africa’s worst drought in a century hundreds of Somalis

19. James Paul Gee, “Tuning into Forms of Life,” Education Australia 19-20 (1993): 13-14. 20. Allan Luke, “The Social Construction of Literacy in the Primary School,” in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Language as Social Practice in the Primary School, ed. Len Unsworth [Melbourne: MacMillan, 1993),23. The reference to “speech events” is from Dell Hymes, “Models of Interaction in Social Life,” in Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, ed. lohn Gumperz and Dell Hymes (New York Holt Rinehart, 1972). 21. The Australian, 14 August 1992 (Sydney: Nationwide News Pty Ltd.), 1.

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were collapsing daily, and millions of Africans were moving from their villages in search of food and water. The United Nations was sending soldiers to ensure the safe passage of aid supplies. The rest of the story states that: the photograph was supplied by Ms. Phoebe Fraser, daughter of a former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser; Malcolm Fraser is president of the aid organization “Care Australia”; The Australian’s readers have already donated thousands of dollars toward relief. The story concluded by providing the names and addresses of six aid agencies in Australia to whom further donations could be sent.

This particular text can be critiqued as a move in one or more language games, by exploring how it constructs reality and positions readers.22 The story constructs the Somalia reality in terms of an extreme drought occurring in a setting where a civil war was going on. In such circumstances, aid agencies coordinate relief. The role for ordinary people is to donate aid. The necessary action is undertaken by aid agencies, with assistance from such special, history-making individuals as the Frasers. Aid agencies exist to respond to calamitous happenings like droughts. Readers are positioned to make meaning from the text from an emotive rather than a rational or informed standpoint. Wordings such as “Africa’s heartbreaking story,” “desperate,” “hope,” and “starving child” set the tone. Readers are positioned to respond to a propaganda device known as “testimonial” -with a former prime minister and his daughter invoked as authoritative support for the particular construction of reality and the construction of the reader-citizen as donor.

At this level of critique, we may arrive at an understanding of the text as a move within a language game or multiple language games (delivering a good front page story; involving citizens in Aid initiatives; extending sympathy; making a “human response”) by using a number of more or less familiar techniques, such as questions suggested by Allan Luke and Norman Fairclough (for example, what version of events is provided here? whose version is it? from whose perspective is it constructed? what other versions are excluded? whoselwhat interests are served and how by this representation? by what lexical or syntactic means does this text construct its reality? and how does this text position the reader?).23

At the level of working from the text to form critical readings of (capital D) Discourse, we endeavor to identify which Discourse( s) the particular text partici- pates in sharpening and deepening this investigation by exploring contrasting texts and Discourses. For example, whereas “The Face of Starving Africa” emphasizes natural disasters as the principal causes of human catastrophes, positing participation in the Aid Discourse by “citizen aid donors“ as an appropriate response, other texts emphasize the extent to which these “natural” disasters and related complica- tions are actually consequences of human-cultural activity, positing Development Discourse and “active and informed citizenship” as more appropriate responses.

22. Colin Lankshear, Critical Literacy (Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association, 1994)

23. Allan Luke, ”Conference Materials” (Working Conference on Critical Literacy, Brisbane, Griffith University, July 1992) and Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989).


As argued elsewhere, the newspaper story may be read as being integral to the discursive construction of passive and underinformed citizens, and to their appren- ticeship to an Aid Discourse.24 This reading sees such texts as channeling readers toward passive and poorly informed “curative” approaches to addressing global and local challenges, and hence as an instatiation of ”problem logics” that help generate such disasters in the first place.

By way of a critical response, teachers and curriculum developers might open up possibilities for D/discourse critique through the scrutiny of texts constructed within competing Discourses, such as “Development” and “Active and Informed Citizenship.” This approach calls for close investigation of the relationship between particular texts and the Discourses in which they are embedded. To invoke Freire’s metaphor, texts serve here as “codifications” of Discourses.

Having broadly conceived ”critical literacy” here, our next interest is with how the “arrival” of the digital text at the gates of mainstream education affects the possibilities for understanding literacies and texts as social and cultural phenomena embedded in (larger) social practices that are historically contingent and mutable; and for relating “word” to “world” in ways that enable us to see ourselves as both shaped by and shapers of discursive practices mediated by language (and, to this extent, as potentially transformative social and cultural actors).

THE DIGITAL TEXT IN CYBERSPACE

Recently, a growing number of theorists have begun building on the work of people like Marshall McLuhan, Andre Gorz, and Michel Foucault to theorize the potential of electronic technologies for new modes of subjectivity and being.2s Donna Haraway was among the leaders here, with her now classic paper “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.”26 Her lead was quickly followed by a “new breed” of Leftist scholars whose work informs our own thinking about language and literacy in the age of the digital text.

Following a poststructuralist line of argument, Mark Poster recasts Marx’s mode of production as the mode of information which, he maintains, reconfigures communication and, thereby, social relation^.^' Many literary and humanist scholars on the Left now talk of the remarkable convergence between poststructuralism and new communications technologies. George Landow, for instance, speaks of a paradigm shift taking place in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Theodore Nelson, of Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam, arguing that “we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with

24. See Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “Critical Literacy and Active Citizenship,” in Constructing Critical Literacies, ed. Sandy Muspratt, Allan Luke, and Peter Freebody (Norwood, N.J.: Hampton Press, forthcoming].

25. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: A n Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism [London: Pluto Press, 1982); Andre Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On Liberation from Work (London: Pluto Press, 1985); and Michel Foucault, PowerlKnowledge and The Foucault Reader.

26. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the i980s,” Socialist Review 15 [ 1985): 65-107.

27. Poster, The Mode o f Information.


ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks.”2X Jay David Bolter, explaining hypertextuality in terms of poststructuralist notions of the open text, remarks, “what is unnatural in print becomes natural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer need saying at all, because it can be shown.”29 Paul Delany and George Landow use poststructuralist theory to explain some of the fundamental features of text-based computing shaping the emergent world of digitized and networked i n f ~ r m a t i o n . ~ ~ Richard Lanham suggests that “poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event.”” He remarks on what he calls the extraordinary convergence of democracy, technology, theory, and the university curriculum. Poster, in a history of the present - a history of the emergence of contemporary electronic technologies - theorizes the democratizing effects of a culture of mass comm~nications.“~ And in The Transparent Society, Gianni Vattimo presents a case for the decisive role of mass media in creating new possibilities for emancipation within postmodern society.33 He argues that the mass media play a decisive role in the birth of postmodern society, and that rather than making society, more transparent the media actually make it more complex and chaotic. It is in this “chaos“ that our hopes for emancipation lie.

According to Vattimo, mass media have been instrumntal in undermining the “grand narratives.” Despite the power of capital, including its convergence and concentration in new telecommunication conglomerates, the mass media have prompted an explosion and proliferation of different world views. Within this “information market” all manner of groups, cultures and subcultures have been able to secure a “voice.” This pluralization of diverse cultural voices has dispelled the linear view of history and the idea of progress that underlies it, making impossible the conception of any single reality, objectively given, once and for all. So much so, says Vattimo, that in late modernity there exist only multiple perspectives, conflict- ing and intersecting images and interpretations. These constitute the only “reality” there is. Within the emancipatory ideal of the transparent society, the mass media act as a window to an objective reality which is the key to emancipation. Within postmodernity, however, this ideal of the media based upon the model of lucid self-consciousness yields to an ideal in which emancipation is based on oscillation and plurality. Here the key to emancipation is found in the plurality and complexity of “ voices”: an emancipation consistingin disorientation which is, at the same time, a liberation of dialect, local differences, and rationalities, each with its own distinctive grammar and syntax.

28. George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory und Technology (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 19921, 2.

29. Bolter, Writing Space, 6 . 30. Paul Delany and George Landow, “Managing thc Digital Word: The Text in an Age of Electronic Reproduction,” in Landow and Delany, The D i g i d Word, 3-32.

31. Lanham, The Electronic Word, xi.

32. Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

33. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 19921.


Such scholars variously theorize new material conditions associated with developments in communications technologies. These developments bring with them emergent practices that redefine the text, notions of textuality, and textual practices. Metaphorically, we can refer to the shift from book to screen in terms of a shift from the geometry of modern or Euclidean space to the infinite space of pure information - cyberspace.

“Cyberspace” is best seen as a speculative term rehabilitated from the genre of science fiction, notably William Gibson’s N e u r o m ~ ~ n c e r . ~ ~ It signals the myth of transition from the information technology of the 1960s to the “hi tech glitz” of virtual reality. The myth of origin, as Allucquere Stone narrates, has its beginnings in early electronic virtual communities based on the invention of the telegraph, the phonograph, the telephone, the motion picture, and the te lev i~ ion .~~ On-line bulletin board services, beginning in the mid 1970s and dependent upon access to terminals rather than the widespread ownership of computers, gave way in the mid-1980s to the notion of cyberspace, fictionalized by Gibson as part of a new technological and social imaginary. According to Erik Davis, “Gibson’s work actually created a social space, organizing the desires and intuitions of people operating in the widely disparate fields of journalism, law, media, psychedelic culture, and computer science,” and thereby “information fantasies.. .entered social practice.”36

In its simplest terms, cyberspace names the space created by the Internet, the so- called “network of networks,” the site of A1 Gore’s ”Information Superhighway,” and the hypertextual virtual reality of the World Wide Web. In short, it names the space of a total textual environment based upon text-based computing, giving rise to the notion of the virtual text, new forms of interactivity, and emergent discourses which collapse informal communication and traditional forms of scholarship. The virtual or digital text lacks fixity and stability, existing only as a fluid and temporary representation of digital codes. Where is the text? Bolter asks; Is it on the screen? Is it simply a trace stored in the computer’s memory? Is it on magnetic tape or an optical

In the remainder of this section we draw from this burgeoning literature six important features of the digital text. These features have important implications for language and literacy education, and need to be considered more closely by educational theorists and teachers than they have been. Eventually, they will be treated in a more critical and nuanced manner than we attempt here; our present aim is to broach some general issues that have received comparatively scant attention from educational audiences.

34. William Gibson, Neurornancer (New York: Paladin, 1984).

35. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedkt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 81-119.

36. Erik Davis, “Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,“ South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 4 (1993): 586.

37. Bolter, Writing Space, 42-43.

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The first feature of the digital text is its “demater ia l i~at ion”~* or “des~bstantiation.”~~ Because the digital text exists only as code it can be transmit- ted in different mediums and reconstituted at various points of arrival in the network. The code as electronic impulses exists not as a physical object in itself - as a closed system of text delivery - but as flows and relays of digital information, infinitely plastic, continuously available, and re~yclab le .~~

A second feature of the digital text is its radical interactiveness, breaking down the reader-writer distinction. Because the electronic text is, in the words of Lanham, both “creator-controlled and reader-controlled,” practices of reading and writing undergo profound tran~formation.~~ The reader can control the size, shape, and scale of screen-print, altering its typography, its readability, its illumination. The reader can add or delete material, incorporate textual scribbles, and rearrange paragraphs before saving and printing the text. As Lanham suggests, “the interactive reader of the electronic word incarnates the responsive reader of whom we make so In doing so, we shift from an author-controlled textual environment where words are fixed on the page in a top-down, left-right, beginning-end, materiality to a reader- controlled environment, infinitely flexible and open to manipulation.

A third feature of the digital text is its integrative power and its radical convertibility, realigning alphabetic, graphic, and sound components into a single common denominator allowing simultaneously the processing of word, image, and sound. Thus the notion of disciplinarity, of separate, distinct subjects each with its own textual time-space -its separate learning-teaching space and its own canon - begins to look problematic. One might talk speculatively here of a new interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity, of a greater synthetic unity of the humanities, arts, and sciences, in which the space between subject specialties becomes eroded and conventional roles for experts and teachers as subject specialists are open to redefinition. Broad-band, multimedia digital “texts” already permit readers to experiment with the design and arrangement of sequences, allowing them to formulate custom-tailored endings. When traditional print-based texts are rear- ranged in this fashion, re-created and supplemented with image- and sound-processing, questions of curriculum are also thereby open to reordering.

38. Delany and Landow, “Managing the Digital Word.”

39. Lanham, The Electronic Word, 11-13. 40. As one reviewer observed, our points about the digital text not being a physical object apply also to conventional texts at the level of “the information object.” We agree, but the desubstantiation of digital texts resists logics of fixity and enclosure in ways not so readily available to conventional texts - notwithstanding attempts to “domesticate” digital texts to more or less conventional formats (as in many distance education and computer-based education initiatives which employ linear information delivery. These possibilities for resisting “enclosure” and their effects on social practices and the formation of subjectivity are important. The “truth” about the information object not being physical, and hence fixed, within conventional print forms was typically lost at the level of everyday practices grounded in the “book” as text paradigm. Like many others, we do not want to see this history repeated in new pedagogies appropriating digital texts.

41. Lanham, The Electronic Word, 4. 42. Ibid., 6.

PETERS AND LANKSHEAR Critical Literacv and Dieital Texts 63

The ease and speed of manipulating alpha-iconic texts - our fourth feature - as we all know, has already transformed composition, freeing us from the constraints of print-based forms. Not only does editing (cutting, adding, formatting) become easier, but in addition the manifold tasks of scholarly composition are enhanced. Library research and scholarship are thrown into new relations with on-line library catalogues and full-text searches. Spell and grammar checks afford new opportunities to insert, correct, and revise electronic manuscripts which, in many cases, are infinitely revisable and updatable on-line. Cyberlinks between texts have created a new intertextuality that poststructuralists have thus far theorized only within the constraints of modernist forms: hypertext, that ideal text described by Roland Barthes in S/Z,43 now exists as “text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web and path.”44 Hypertext and hypermedia permit a new manipulability undreamed of in the forced linear landscape of print-based culture. Not only does it permit the emergence of new discourses and substitute a multivocality for the centeredness and fixity of print- based texts, but by disturbing the linear sequence, hypertext creates the possibility of new reading practices that are associative and follow multilinear reading paths becoming normal

A fifth feature of digital texts is the reconfiguration of discourse, especially as it occurs at the intersection between informal modes of communication and traditional scholarly journal-based forms. This reconfiguration or, more properly, the emergence of new forms of discourse is perhaps most evident in electronic journals and on-line discussion groups. Anne Okerson, President of the Association of Research Librarians, indicates that the number of e-journals and newsletters identified in the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, based on Michael Strangelove’s work, has grown from around 1 10 titles in 199 1 to an estimated total in excess of 400 titles in Spring 1994. Some of these, as Okerson comments, “are not quite like anything we have experienced in the print world: some forms would be discussions, reflecting the apparently expanding role of preprints, and hybrids that we can’t quite characteri~e.“~~ Another scholar, reviewing developments in the field of mathematics and the impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, hypothesizes the emergence of new discourse forms based upon the logic of participation in moderated discussion groups, whose formats, he suggests, blur the line between informal communication and formal reviewed p~blication.~’

43. Roland Barthes, S/Z [London: Cape, 1979).

44. Landow, Hypertext, 3.

45. Ibid., 8. See also, Nicholas C. Burbules and Thomas L. Callister, “Knowledge at the Crossroads: Some Alternative Futures of Hypertext Learning Environments,” in this volume. 46. Anne Okerson, ”Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz. Or, There is a There There,” Surfaces IV (1994): 102.

47. Andrew Odlyzko, “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance?: The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals,” Surfaces IV /1994): 105.

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Finally, as a sixth feature, we suggest that the digital text in cyberspace makes problematic the politics of publishing based upon the print-text system. It does so by reducing the costs of text dissemination, by disturbing gatekeeping mechanisms and hierarchies in the print-based industry, and, more forcefully, by breaking down the notion of author and authorial forms of text production and ownership. The politics of print-based culture and publishing, based on the authority of publishing houses, copyright, and the institution of the library, are challenged by a logic of circulation and dissemination built around interactivity and participation by anybody at a terminal. On-line user groups and bulletin boards have already been described as “hi tech universal graffiti.” The trivia of much information stored and circulated in these forms is doubtless a product of its newness and accessibility. As mentioned above, these forms of informal electronic communication permit new formats which filter, edit, or moderate much of this dis-information.

On the other hand, it could be argued that, from the standpoint of educational values and aims, at least some - and perhaps much - of the experimentation and creativity evident in the development of new vocabularies, signs, and codes by cyberspace citizens testifies to a human will to activity, invention, and transformative engagement which resists logics of scarcity, ownership, and even, perhaps, profit. One could argue, in short, that this participatory and interactive medium potentially offers a new accessibility to the power to inform and be informed: power conceived in a poststructuralist way as relational and as a production; not as a commodity or fixed possession bought and sold under the logic of exchange value.48

This points to something which is of particular and current concern to univer- sities and other knowledge institutions. Delany and Landow claim that “the same virtuality that permits.. .new forms of scholarly activity also produces a cluster of new problems involving ownership, authorial control, responsibility, reader access, and transience of in f~rmat ion .”~~ Copyright, patents, and intellectual property in general must now be renegotiated. In an information economy where copies can be made with ease and ”originals” can be modified on-line before undergoing rapid dispersal and dissemination, intellectual property becomes something of a fiction, if not a contradiction:

After the technology of the printing press enabled the rapid production of multiple copies of a work, copyright law emerged to establish a market for printed text. In a world of electronic word and image, literally every fundamental principle of that law, and hence of that market-place, must be renegotiated.5”

THE DIGITAL TEXT AND CRITICAL LITERACY IN CYBERSPACE We believe that these six features of the digital text in cyberspace can lead to new

understandings of the flexibility and interpenetration of textual practices which, in turn, open up new possibilities for theorizing and practicing critical literacy.

48. Having emphasized the potential for such ”progressive” outcomes, we nonetheless agree with one reviewer’s reservations concerning the way things have tracked out empirically thus far. Our point, of course, is that if the sorts of ideals we favor are to be seen in the first place as serious and viable options, they must first be named, advocated, and championed. This is the task we are hoping to contribute to here.

49. Delany and Landow, “Managing the Digital Word,” 16

50. Lanham, The Electronic Word, 4.

PETERS AN11 LANKSHEAR Critical Literacy and Digital Texts 65

As indicated in our account of critical literacy, practices of reading and writing are not separate from the realm of social practices in general. In fact, reading and writing are part and parcel of whole webs of social practice that collectively constitute our social reality. Critical theorists such as Freire have drawn attention to the relationship between “reading the word” and “reading the world” as dialecti- cal moments or constitutive elements of sociocultural practice. Freire pictures reading and writing in terms of cultural action for freedom. Within Freire’s critical pedagogy, speaking, reading, and writing texts are inherently bound up with transformed and transforming cultural practices intended to make the social world more democratic. While Freire advocates cultural action mediated by texts for transformative ends, it is necessary to recognize that the relationship between literacy and Discourse remains essentially the same when reading and writing texts is imbricated in reproductive cultural practices. Kress, among others, has noted that language is social practice.j’

Of course, many educationists in the First World responded to Freire’s critical literacy by saying that it made sense in and was important for the Third World, but was basically naive and idealist when it came to education in the First World. The reason typically given was that the First World is fundamentally different from Third World settings: oppression is not so obvious; there is some evidence, by comparison, for social mobility between classes; and there exist more benign political forms. On the basis of our analysis here, however, we believe we can see more deeply embedded reasons underlying these doubts about the applicability of the Freirean ideal of critical literacy. Our analysis suggests that these doubts are misplaced.

What has happened, we think, is that the institutions of the book, the textbook, the classroom, the curriculum, and the school - all embodiments of modernist spaces of enclosure - have separated out a set of bounded social practices as “educational” and demarcated them from other sets of similarly bounded social practices based upon the institutions of the family, the workplace, the corporation, the law, the church, and the various political institutions of the public sphere. As a consequence, it has become difficult, and often impossible, to envisage how critical literacy could be more than a merely educational act (that is, enclosed within the “education“ site and thereby effectively confined to reading “the Word”J; but, rather, constitute a transformative social practice across artificial compartments of lived experience and the social world.

Breaking free of such an “enclosured” consciousness is the first fruit of critical literacy. Moreover, inherent features of electronically mediated communication have a distinctive capacity to help break down spaces of institutional enclosure and make more transparent the interpenetration of reading and writing with those larger webs of social practices that constitute our To this extent, practices involving the production, distribution, and exchange of digital texts contain interest- ing possibilities for constructing critical literacy as transformative social practice.

51. Kress, Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice.

52. Freire, Pedagogyof the Oppressed; Education for Critical Consciousness; The Politics of Education; and Freire and Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World.

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The social construction of the interactive reader engaged in the act of meaning making with texts is made manifest in the textual interchanges of cyberspace. Reader Response theorists, among others, have insisted that meaning does not reside in the text as a freezing of authorial intent but that, rather, readers “write” their meanings in processes of active engagement with texts.j3 As we have seen, in cyberspace the shift from book to screen challenges in significant ways the everyday lived distinction between reader and writer, and implicitly questions all forms of authorial control. On-line networking, for example, is an embodied visceral experience of the practice of meaning-making as active collaborative engagement; it can literally be traced as reader-writers add to and modify digital texts posted in the ether around shared purposes, and as scholarly peers construct collaborative texts.

We can see more clearly now that presumptions and deep presuppositions which come with the book as the paradigm form of the text underwrite all modernist educational spaces of enclosure. As noted above, these presumptions and presuppositions include the fixity and stability of the word, its left-right/top-down/beginning- end axes, the text as an author-controlled environment, the teacher as authoritative bearer of textual meaning (as author surrogate), and so on. These bases of modernist institutionalized spaces of enclosure are now open - explicitly open - to critique. The radical interactiveness and convertibility of digital text undermines at the level of lived textual practice the very notion of a static, immutable, transcendent reality pictured by the book. With the burgeoning of cyberspace, readers/writers of digital texts are living through, and very much experience themselves as living through, a profound cultural tran~formation.~~ Cyberspace is a sociocultural and political construction.

Critical literacy has stressed that, as social practices, reading and writing are cultural phenomena: that is, they are essentially practices of communities and not of isolated indwiduals. This observation lies behind Wittgenstein’s private language argument as much as it informs Freire’s dictum that the “I think’’ (“read,” “write,” etc.) presupposes the “We think.” Cyberspace denies the possibility of an individual operating in isolation. Furthermore, the model of consciousness based on the book as text paradigm, which implies the unity, stability, and coherence of the subject, is undermined, and alternative models based on different text forms - intertextuality, multitextuality, hybrids of all kinds - can now be entertained. It even suggests new notions of collective and interactive agency, with attendant new political possibili- tiess5

53. See, for example, D.W. Harding, “The Role of the Onlooker,” Scrutiny 6, no. 3 (1937): 247-58 and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [London: Routledge, 1976).

54. See, for example, Henry Giroux, “Slacking Off Border Youth and Postmodern Education,” in Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces, Henry Giroux, Colin Lankshear, Peter McLaren andMichael Peters (New York: Routledge, in press]; Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (San Francisco: Harper, 1994); Douglas Rushkoff, ed. The GenX Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994); and Neil Howe and Bill Straws, 23th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail! (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 55. Richard Smith, “Cyberpunk Nurseries: Computer Game-Playing among Young Children and Adoles- cents” [Research Grant Application, Griffith University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Brisbane, 1994).


However, we are not pure enthusiasts about cyberspace and, by way of conclusion, we want to stress four caveats. The first is to recognize that there are dangers as well as constructive possibilities associated with the new electronic environment. Second, tensions exist between the new educational possibilities in electronically mediated communication and traditional structures of enclosure. Third, there is a need to develop new pedagogies consonant with the potential inherent in these new media if their potential is to be fulfilled. Finally, the themes we have traced need to be linked explicitly to the generic account of critical literacy offered at the beginning of this paper.

Some of the dangers attending the new electronic environment are readily apparent: increased state surveillance of its citizens through information sharing among government departments; the vulnerability of the information system as a whole to breakdowns, sabotage, and computer viruses; the risks of cultural imperi- alism and the capacity for manipulation of desire and opinion which come with any system of mass communication; and the potential polarizing of information-rich and information-poor economies. It is important not to embrace uncritically and naively the arrival of the electronic age. We are aware that we have "surfed" on the side of optimism and openness here. This orientation must be tempered by a recognition of the darker side of "cyberspace" and the electronic age.56

With regard to tensions between new educational possibilities associated with electronic technologies and traditional structures of enclosure, it is entirely possible for cyberspace and the digital text to be "domesticated" by treating them inside the same presumptions that undergird modernist institutionalized spaces. As we have noted, cyberspace is a sociocultural construction which is always, so to speak, "up for grabs." Just as critical literacy does not name a finite practice or set of practices, neither does "cyberspace," as a site for social practice, name any one kind of cultural space. We share here the concern, already raised by numerous writers, that cyberspace may be constructed as an instrumental and technocratic way of merely transmitting information and delivering lessons - as in the worst extant cases of distance education, or of students writing with computers where nothing much of signifi- cance has changed over using print packages and typewriters or b i ro~ .~ ' There are already strong tendencies in the direction of "domesticating" electronic media within classroom settings in Australia, and the same observation is almost a commonplace in North American commentaries. In some cases, for example, marginal students who represent behavioral risks or who have become alienated from mainstream classroom-based school attendance, are being given the option - sometimes under custodial arrangements - of "doing school" by distance, often in

56. Chris Bigum and Bill Green, "Technologizing Literacy: The Dark Side of the Dream," Discourse: The Australian lournal ofEducational Studies 12, no. 2 11992): 4-28; Heim, TheMetaphysics o f Virtual Reality; Howard Rheingold, Virtual Community [London: Secker and Warburg, 19941, chap. 10; and Rushkoff, Cyberia . 57. Compare Cohen, "Educational Technology, Policy, and Practice"; Cuban, Teachers and Machines; Hodas, "Technology Refusal and the Organizational Culture of Schools; Green and Bigum, Hypermedia or Media Hype?"; and Papert, The Children's Machine.

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conjunction with attendance at “adventure programs” designed to shape them into more desirable youth citizens. Elsewhere, educators who are unfamiliar with or have not otherwise reflected upon the “sociology of cyberspace“ continue to conduct business as usual.58

The dangers and tensions noted here point to the need to develop new pedagogies if the potential for critical practices around texts is to be realized. Here texts are not prescribed books so much as reader-constructed intertexts which are part of everyday practices. They may involve the confluence of words, sounds, and images, bringing the television program and rock video more centrally into the ambit of reflective analysis. Indeed, they may involve the active construction of these in terms of different endings in a completely reader-controlled environment. New pedagogies undoubtedly will revolve around reconceptualizing texts as multilinear, decentered networks of meaning that are experienced as unities of language and larger embodied social practices. This is an important challenge that requires serious further investigation of the terrain we have traversed here.

In conclusion, let us indicate very briefly how points raised above may relate back to the three foci within our generic account of critical literacy: that is, critical literacy as critique of literacy per se; as critique of discrete texts as moves within language games; and as critical “readings” and “(re)writings” of Discourses. To be sure, some of these literacy issues are not entirely new: for example, if we print out texts from Internet spaces, or from e-mail exchanges, it is perfectly reasonable in many cases to treat them within critical literacy more or less as we would similar texts from the everyday world of print, in respect of analytic techniques, normative concerns, and the like. At the same time, digital texts generate new themes and encourage extant themes to be approached and understood from new or different angles, or with a renewed interest. We will note some examples here, around our three ”foci.”

First, to make literacy or literacies the object of critique is precisely to investigate textual practices in terms of the relationship between literacy and discursive practice. In cyberspace it is to recognize new hybrid forms of D/discourse, multilinear reading paths, changes to the practices of composition, and the way that new text forms disturb institutions and practices as diverse as copyright law, plagiarism, and publishing. Pedagogically, new linkages produced in cyberspace and constituted in student understandings must be construed as new modes of subjectivity and, indeed, of being. The society which gave us movable type gave us the compositor, the author, and the publisher; the society which gives us the digital text gives us the hacker, the cyberpunk, and the user group - among others.

Second, for particular digital texts to be made the focus of critique they must be construed as ‘‘reader constructed.“ In conjunction and juxtaposition, as collage and montage, the reader constructs his or her consciousness in terms of an interactive

~~~~ ~~

58. Cuban, Teachers and Mnchines; Stephen Kerr, “Lever and Fulcrum: Educational Technology in Teachers’ Thought and Practice,” Teachers College Record 93 [Fall 1991): 114-36; and Papert, The Children’s Machine.


intertextuality. The “book” now becomes those bits of text that are joined together, one way or another, by the reader, and these subjective or intersubjective bits of texts become the object of critique. Key questions to be posed within a critical literacy in cyberspace include: Why are certain bits of text bought together in a particular constellation? On what principles are images, sounds, and texts amalgamated in this way, in these particular circumstances, at this time? What purposes or interests do these assemblages or constructions of the world serve? How do they affect the way people live? Why are these elements of text, sound, and image brought together in this way and not in other possible combinations? What might it do to put music to this text or text to these images? And so on.

This will, of course, not displace the critical reading and writing of conventional print texts as moves in language games -at least, not in the foreseeable future. The critical engagement with digital texts that we envisage here will proceed alongside and in a fruitful dialectic with the kinds of reflective practice described in our earlier account of critical literacy. As Bolter claims,

The printed book ... seems destined to move to the margins of our literate culture. The issue is not whether print technology will completely disappear; books may long continue to be printed for certain kinds of texts and for luxury consumption. But the idea and the ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries. This shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of literacy. What will be lost is not literacy itself, but the literacy of print, for electronic technology offers us a new kind of book and new ways to write and read.’y

We anticipate, hopefully, the increasing emergence of classrooms in which the language games of “bookspace,” the burgeoning language games of “cyberspace,” and their respective texts and text types provide rich environments for future and futuristic conceptions and practices of critical literacy.

Finally, for text-mediated and text-maintained social practices, or social relations to be investigated as practices of critical literacy in cyberspace calls for asking such questions as: What are these social practices (for example, the self-monitoring of bulletin board space by members of user groups; the multiauthored and on-line peer reviewed process of writing an e-journal article; the moderated discussion group; forms of homeworking and telecommuting; and video surveillance)? How do they shape the way people live and the forms their humanity might take, or not take? With what consequences for which groups?

Reality is dynamic and complex. The digital text refracts this complexity and dynamism, helping to make more explicit relations and processes that, in the past, have often been mystified by static and enclosed categories and the “separateness” of institutions. There are possibilities for critical literacy in cyberspace which differ from, and otherwise expand, earlier conceptions and practices of critical engagement with texts. The digital text offers opportunities we do well to anticipate, appropriate, and develop creatively as best we can. Likewise, the electronic age harbors actual and potential risks to educationally and ethically worthwhile ways of doing and being. We will do well to anticipate these and prepare ourselves and our students as best we

59. Bolter, Writing Space, 2, cited in Lanham, The Ekctronic Word, x


can for addressing them. Construed as a call to analysis and evaluation, critical literacy surely has a continuing and important educational future.

THIS ESSAY HAS BENEFITED GREATLY from critical input provided by Nicholas C. Burbules and three anonymous reviewers. They identified a number of structural and thematic issues in need of further attention. We have addressed these as best we can in the space available and thank them for their efforts and care. We realize this revised version doubtless retains shortfalls for which they are in no way responsible.

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CRITICAL LITERACY AND DIGITAL TEXTS