... an 18-member panel of educators comprising the National Commission on ... the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the study was the first of its kind, and its ... which one can access items from the latter's television content via iTunes.
E–Learning and Digital Media Volume 8 Number 3 2011 www.wwwords.co.uk/ELEA
Digital (A)Literacy PHIL ROSE Department of Communication Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
ABSTRACT This article investigates the tendency of those who explore the topic of ‘electronic literacies’ to downplay the fundamental nature and importance of the perceptual habits associated with print literacy, and highlights the opposite tendency of reading and writing specialists to decontextualize the acquisition of these fundamental skills from the character of the culture at large. Making the case for a perspective located somewhere between these two positions, which attends to cognitive and neurological distinctions between our media interfaces, the author surveys a number of purported social trends in the United States. Among these are the increased rates of television viewing; the inadequacy of writing practice and instruction in American educational institutions; and the migration of writing, typing, and reading to the computer screen. In relation to these trends, he considers our prospects for the cultivation of a type of ‘secondary literacy’, in order that we might attain a kind of equilibrium within the cultural conditions that Walter Ong describes as ‘secondary orality’ – a phenomenon inherent in our general reliance on the most common electronic communication forms, which, in the communication contexts that they create, predominantly employ the spoken word and moving imagery.
Most scholars concerned with the topic of ‘electronic literacies’ tend no longer to define ‘literacy’ in any singular or monolithic way, but do so, rather, in a pluralistic and holistic manner that is more widely understood as ‘media-literacy’. Catherine Beavis, for instance, observed early on (in Snyder, 1998) how multimedia and digital technologies were changing what we understand as literacy, and suggested that in our age of new information technologies we would require at least five new ‘literacies’. These she listed as ‘multimedia authoring skills’, ‘multimedia critical analysis’, ‘cyberspace exploration strategies’, ‘cyberspace navigation skills’, and ‘the capacity to negotiate and deconstruct images, both visual and verbal’. Similarly, for Bertram Bruce (2003), literacy is ‘an assortment of practices, or multiliteracies’ that we actively construct; and, fundamentally, it is the space in which we create meaning in interaction with others. Such spaces, Bruce suggests, include the different academic disciplines that define or demand different ways to represent meaning, the different social practices that draw upon different communicative means, the different cultures that point to different primary literacies, and the different media that demand different critical faculties. Bruce emphasizes that the activity of ‘literacy’ is never frozen, and counsels, therefore, that it is imprudent to try to isolate exactly the skills one needs to learn. Evidently, ‘literate’ individuals from this point of view amount to amateur semioticians at the very least. And though I accept the spirit of such accolades to a vibrant ‘transliteracy’ (that is, the ability to read, to write, and to interact across a broad range of media platforms), here I suggest that these accounts of what constitutes ‘literacy’ in the information age tend not to make enough of the word’s original sense, which, of course, denotes the skills involved with learning how to read and write. At the same time, one can observe the opposite tendency of reading and writing specialists to decontextualize the acquisition of these fundamental skills from the character of the culture at large. Making the case for a perspective located somewhere between these two positions, here I survey a number of social trends in the United States – among which are the increased rates of 258
http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2011.8.3.258
Digital (A)Literacy television viewing and associated problems, the inadequacy of writing practice and instruction in American educational institutions, and the migration of writing, reading and practically everything else to the computer screen. In relation to these trends, I explore our prospects for the cultivation of a type of ‘secondary literacy’ in order to counterbalance the electric age cultural conditions that Walter Ong (1967, 1982) famously identifies as ‘secondary orality’ – a phenomenon inherent in our general reliance on the most common electronic communication forms, which, in the communication contexts they create, predominantly employ moving imagery and the spoken word. A properly holistic view of literacy must attend to the cognitive and neurological distinctions between print literacy and our various other contemporary media interfaces, and the internationally recognized specialist in early childhood literacy Marie M. Clay effectively begins this task in her book Becoming Literate: the construction of inner control (1991). Clay discusses the period from when formal instruction in school commences, up to the relative independence of the third year of schooling, when successful students acquire a network of competencies that serve to power self-directed learning. For Clay, becoming literate involves learning the mutually enforcing activities of reading and writing. The former she describes as ‘a message getting, problem-solving activity which increases in power and flexibility the more it is practised’, and she notes her definition’s dependency on the ‘directional constraints of the printer’s code’ (Clay, 1991, p. 6). This is to say that her definition of literacy requires an account of the visual perceptual skills involved in the decoding of print. There must be ‘a continuous visual language context from which the reader wishes to extract meaning’ in order for it to be properly called ‘a reading task’, she points out, adding that the application of visual perception skills to type ‘is more complicated than just mere looking and snapping the image into the brain like a photograph’ (Clay, 1991, p. 261). Rather, readers must come to locate and recognize patterns and sequence of stimuli. Not only must perceivers detect relevant stimuli, identify them, and distinguish them from other similar ones, they must direct their attention, as they select what to attend to, break up the patterned stimulus into parts, and transform or integrate the information. Good readers effectively search for different sources of visual cues in print, make decisions based on these cues, and rapidly shift to efficiently using chunks or patterns of information. At first, such activity is based on the use of clusters of letters or sounds, but later it extends through whole words to message-getting at the text level through the linguistic feature of ‘cohesion’ (the way pronouns refer back to nouns, for instance, or the way subordinated clauses relate back to their main clauses). Clay concludes that reading behaviour in the first two to three years of instruction ‘becomes organized into a complex system of strategies for cue-finding, cue-using, choosing, checking, and correcting ... in a way that sets the patterns for subsequent gains in skill’ (Clay, 1991, p. 315). Clay’s position that reading is more complicated than ‘looking and snapping the image into the brain like a photograph’ is supported by Maryanne Wolf (2007). Pointing out that cognitive processes rest on tangible neurological structures, Wolf explains that with the invention of writing we actually rearranged the very organization of our brains. With the different and increasingly sophisticated demands of each new type of writing system came the requirement of further different adaptations of the brain’s original structures, which, in the process, helped to increase our repertoire of intellectual capacities. Unlike speech, reading has no direct genetic program, and, according to Wolf, to ‘read’ a symbol first demanded two sets of novel connections, the first cognitive-linguistic and the second cerebral. Because they were pictographic, the earliest signs in Sumerian cuneiform demanded only slightly more abstraction than their original tokens. But over time the symbols became less pictographic and more logographic and abstract, eventually coming also to represent some of the syllables of oral Sumerian. This transformation into what linguists identify as a logosyllabary, Wolf observes, ‘makes a great many more demands on the brain’, because it inevitably involves more cognitive systems, and requires ‘more elaborate cerebral circuitry’ (Wolf, 2007, p. 34). What she calls ‘the alphabetic principle’ is seen to change the way the brain performs not only in the visual cortex, but in regions that underlie ‘auditory and phonological operations such as perception, discrimination, analysis, and the representation and manipulation of speech sounds’ (p. 153).
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Phil Rose The First Curriculum Marie Clay makes a few cultural observations of which we should take note. She observes how preschool children’s language development is vital to their progress in reading, and that this is true not just in terms of vocabulary development or articulation of sounds, but also in terms of the range and flexibility of the patterns of sentences they are able to control. This, of course, is something which critically depends on what preschool opportunities they have to converse with adults. Clay observes also the importance of preschool opportunities for learning about books and writing, and recognizes the widely held view that learning to read and write in school will be easier for the child whose pre-school literacy experiences are rich than for the child with almost no literacy experience. Preschoolers who have been read to a great deal ‘will be developing “an ear” for bookish or literary forms of language’ (Clay, 1991, p. 26), and will already know that the language of books is different from the language that we speak. ‘The most valuable preschool preparation for school learning is to love books,’ she writes, ‘and to know that there is a world of interesting ideas in them’ (Clay, 1991, p. 29). It is reasonable to assume, she summarizes, that for the formation of the network of strategies conducive to literacy learning, the first years of formal instruction will be crucial. Most remarkable about Clay’s discussion of literacy is her failure to address the general disregard with which reading is held within contemporary culture. This is not to mention her lack of engagement with those elements that are, in fact, inimical to the attainment of the type of print literacy at which she aims. Although she does not profess to address the topic of ‘electronic literacies’, it is curious that someone should imagine such considerations as being unconnected to the process of acquiring reading and writing skills in the modern world - particularly since Clay’s books and methods still provide a primary literacy resource for Ministries of Education worldwide. For perspective, it is worth quoting her at length: Many of the long-standing debates in education pivot around the issue of whether teachers teach learners or learners teach themselves. There are some important secondary issues. If what children learn is directly a product of what teachers teach, then when a proportion of the children get it wrong is that the fault of the teachers? Alternatively, if children teach themselves and teachers merely arrange the opportunities, how do we explain the lack of progress in children who fail to teach themselves? Theories of disabilities in the field of literacy have developed to account for these problematic cases. It is possible that many of the ‘disabilities’ are a product of our willingness to believe that they should exist…. Only the child can develop strategic control over the experiences and information coded somehow in his brain and governing many of his behaviours…. No teacher can manipulate those strategic activities in any tightly controlled way. There can be no teaching programme to engineer this control because it is a product of the idiosyncratic past history of the learner. (Clay, 1991, pp. 341-342)
In relation to this idiosyncratic past history, American learners by the early 1990s, when Clay is writing, had long been encountering the learning environment represented by the school - what Neil Postman (1979) refers to as ‘the second curriculum’ - by way of and in tandem with what he calls ‘the first curriculum’ – that is, television. As a possible clue for comprehending Clay’s incognizance of the electronic information environment, we might refer to her own quotation of the words of Leslie Henderson, whose ideas she connects to an awareness of the fundamental phenomenological processes uncovered by her own work: ‘The study of perception is, perhaps, the most difficult area of psychological inquiry to justify to intelligent people,’ Henderson writes. ‘They are prepared for the answers to psychological questions to be bizarre or convoluted. What they are not ready for is to be confronted with an investigation where they detect no psychological question at all’ (Henderson, in Clay, 1991, p. 258). Nonetheless, detecting no psychological question at all is where Clay appears to be positioned in the matter. This is in marked contrast to Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, who, in their Laws of Media: the new science (1988), refer to the brain-wave studies of General Electric researcher Herbert Krugman. Krugman (1971) compared the responses of a single subject to print and to television, and his study was allegedly originally undertaken in order to try to disprove that ‘the medium is the message’. His results, however, as they report, ‘point to the massive and subliminal erosion of our culture through right-hemisphere indoctrination by TV in all its forms, including 260
Digital (A)Literacy VCRS, video games, computer monitors, and word-processors’ (Krugman, 1971, p. 71). In comparison with the activity of reading print, Krugman outlines how people’s response to television – that is, any cathode-ray tube – is one predominantly characterized by right-hemispheric activity that issues in a relaxed, passive, and unfocused alpha state. Referring in different terms to what Walter Ong describes as the cultural phenomenon of ‘secondary orality’, the McLuhans suggest that ‘[i]n a wider sense, all electric media, as a new ground, give salience only to the right hemisphere. There is no way to quantify the right hemisphere, which emphasizes inner and qualitative aspects of experience’ (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 71). Noting that all individuals have two distinct modes or styles of cognitive activity – the left hemisphere of the brain processing information logically and analytically, and the right processing information emotionally and uncritically – the McLuhans submit, with regard to dyslexia and other reading difficulties, that such are in large part the direct result of TV and other electric media ‘pressuring us into returning to the right hemisphere’. It is little surprise, therefore, that we find ‘students whose right brains have had eighteen years’ education by TV have problems with left-brain curricula and SAT tests’ (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 76). While Zimmerman & Christakis (2005) in this regard have illustrated that children’s excessive watching of TV and video depresses creativity and imagination and discourages interpretation and reflection, Hancox et al (2005) observe its long-lasting connection with poor educational outcomes, and Ritchie et al (1987) find that television viewing and reading achievement, specifically, are strongly and negatively correlated. This is likely because studies of the neural development of typical reading, as Wolf outlines in an ongoing manner, illustrate that, over time, there exists in reading words a ‘progressive disengagement’ of the right hemisphere’s larger visual recognition system, and an increasing engagement of the frontal, temporal and occipital-temporal regions of the left hemisphere. In the reading brain’s normal distribution of labour, she observes, ‘the usually dominant left hemisphere selects the correct orientation of a letter (b or d) or of a letter sequence (“not” rather than “ton”)’ (Wolf, 2007, 183). In dyslexia this pattern either does not occur or is dramatically delayed; the McLuhans describe dyslexia as ‘an inability to adopt a single, fixed point of view with respect to all letters and words: conversely, it consists of approaching letters and words from many points of view simultaneously (right-hemisphere fashion), minus the assumption that any one way is solely correct’ (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 76). They add that ‘[a]s the pressure continues, so will the problems with our left-hemisphere alphabet’ (p. 76). Impaired readers, as Wolf (2007) describes, do not use their left hemisphere in auditory processes in the same ways that average readers do, either. Rather, again they illustrate right-hemisphere superiority. Despite suggestions that television viewing has been decreasing because of people’s increasing usage of new media forms, the world’s largest provider of TV and audience data, Nielsen Media Research, reported in 2005 and 2006 that US households over the previous two years had spent more time in front of a TV set than they had since the 1950s, when the firm first began measuring national audiences. While the average individual American’s daily viewing time of four hours and thirty-two minutes was more than it had been in fifteen years, among college students the periods were on average somewhat lower, at three hours and forty-one minutes per day. Zimmerman & Christakis (2007) published the first-ever survey of the viewing habits of US children under two years of age, and their study found that about 40 percent of 3-month-olds watch television or videos for an average of 45 minutes a day, while 90 percent of children by the age of 2 watch an average of 90 minutes per day. The researchers suggest that the primary reason given by parents is not the conventional explanation that the television is a handy ‘baby-sitter’, but that most of them think they are using television as an educational tool. In other words, they believe that the content of programs directed at babies is good for their brain development, despite nearly a decade of warnings by paediatricians to the contrary. The study suggests that such early exposure to screens can have a harmful impact on an infant’s rapidly developing brain, and puts children at higher risk for attention problems, diminished reading comprehension, and obesity. In response to parents’ perceptions that their children were enjoying the televisual experience, Christakis (in Meltz, 2007) suggests: ‘Yes, the baby is staring at the screen, but it’s wrong to think the child likes it…. He or she has no choice in the matter. He’s hard-wired to pay attention to anything that is fast-moving, brightly colored or loud.’ Clearly the general situation is not, as Richard Lanham (1993) presents in his oversimplified critique of Postman (1985), simply a case of an upset of the former alphabet/image ratio across the 261
Phil Rose transition from the era of print to the era of electronics. Postman surely does make reference to ‘the seductions of imagery’, but he is certainly not oblivious to ‘the seductions of eloquence’. Rather, what Postman emphasizes is the allurements of moving imagery in combination with the spoken word, sound effects, and music’s idiosyncratic seductions – that is, what Huston & Wright (1983) refer to as television’s ‘perceptual salience’. This powerful sensuality, of course, is what gives the symbolic form of television its sheer seductiveness, and, in this relation, Christakis’s observation in the paragraph above relates well to remarks that Postman (1982) makes elsewhere in regard to the long-running children’s television show Sesame Street: Its creators have accepted without reservation the idea that learning is not only not obstructed by entertainment but, on the contrary, is indistinguishable from it. In defending this conception of education, Jack Blessington, director of Educational Relations for WCBS, has observed ‘that there is a gap between kids’ personal and cognitive development that schools don’t know how to address’. He went on to explain: ‘We live in a highly sophisticated, electronically oriented society. Print slows everything down.’ Just so. Print means a slowed-down mind. Electronics means the speeded-up mind. (pp. 116-117)
As Postman points out, the gap that Blessington speaks of represents that between the sloweddown processes of thought that the art of ‘exposition’ eventually encourages in students, and the fast-tempo audio and visual responses required by an entertaining show. But beyond the ‘speeding up’ that television’s multi-sensory involvement effects in the viewer’s brain, we can also refer to television’s increased rate of editing cuts. With regard to Sesame Street in particular, Koolstra et al (2004) conducted a study of the program’s pace and editing speed, finding that the number of editing cuts in the program doubled over the 26-year period between 1977 and 2003. Nevertheless, Hooper & Chang (1998) found that scenes in such children’s shows made for public television networks typically lasted more than 70 percent longer than those such as Scooby Doo which were produced for commercial television. The latter researchers conclude therewith that ‘the recent proliferation of attention deficit disorders of school age children might be a natural reaction to today’s “speeded-up” culture…we live in an attention deficit culture’ (Hooper & Chang, 1998, p. 433). Christakis & Zimmerman (2006) observe how the last couple of decades have seen a ten-fold increase in diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is now the commonest behavioural problem in the United States – with current estimates suggesting that it affects between 8 and 12 percent of children. The disorder, we should note, is a condition where the parts of the brain used for controlling impulses are underactive, and it has a significantly higher incidence in males, the afflicted among whom are also four times more likely to develop some type of mental illness within a decade. Acevedo-Polakovich et al (2007) report that children with ADHD typically enjoy reading less and are not as involved in reading-related activities as their non-referred peers. Compared with children without the disorder, children with ADHD have twice the likelihood of requiring an academic tutor, of being placed in special education, of repeating a grade, or of being diagnosed with a reading disorder. Christakis et al (2004) found that for every hour of television a child watches per day, a 9 percent increase in attentional damage occurs, and therefore the researchers discourage any and all screen time during the formative period of brain development, which takes place up to the age of 2, in that this might diminish children’s subsequent risk of developing ADHD. Aligned with the new tendency of students in the field of genetics to move away from descriptions of traits as either ‘genetic’ or ‘environmental’ and towards understanding how our ‘gene-environmental’ interactions help to shape us, Christakis & Zimmerman (2006) report that ADHD fully develops ‘only when there is a very strong genetic predisposition with a small environmental contribution or when there is a moderate genetic risk coupled with a moderate environmental risk’ (p. 21). In this regard, they outline three possible mechanisms involved in television’s reduction of children’s ability to stay focused and pay attention: its shaping of structural changes in the developing brain; its structuring of children’s habits of mind; and its creation of language deficits or delays in language acquisition. They add that excessive viewing of stressful or violent content also likely affects children’s ability to pay attention to content that is devoid of highly charged emotion. Christakis & Zimmerman (2006) point out that although we cannot change our children’s genes, we do have the ability to modify their environment; and they found that taking kids to 262
Digital (A)Literacy museums, telling them stories, or reading to them were all associated with increased attention. Acknowledging that the typical American schoolchild’s time in front of the TV approximates that which he or she spends in class, Christakis (2009) also cites the more recent discovery that children in US day cares are watching up to 1.39 hours of television and videos per day, which means that many children under the age of 2 are doing so for up to 30-40% of their waking hours. Whereas the average age at which American children began watching TV in 1971 was almost 4 years old, today, according to Christakis (2009), it is 5 months, and Sigman (2007) documents that this trend is not merely a North American phenomenon, reporting how the average contemporary six-year-old British child will have spent one full year of his or her life watching television.[1] Sigman records that more than half of three-year-olds in Britain have television sets in their bedrooms, and Christakis observes in the American context that this is true of nearly one third of pre-school children and three quarters of adolescents. Acevedo-Polakovich et al (2007) determined that such children watch an average of 23.4 hours of television per week, compared with an average of 15.1 hours per week for children who do not have bedroom TV sets. They found too that children with a television in the bedroom were reported to read less, to have fewer printed materials in the home (e.g. books, newspapers, magazines), to have more electronic media items generally, and to have parents who report having a less negative attitude toward television. Moreover, their findings indicate that school-aged children with ADHD are twice as likely as nonreferred children to have a TV in their bedroom, and though this could account in part for their heavier TV use, the researchers nevertheless found that children with ADHD who did not have television sets in their bedrooms still watched more television than their non-referred counterparts. Children with ADHD are also found to watch more television with their parents, and a possible component of the cultural environment in such homes which may influence this is the nature of parent-child interactions, which tend to be quite stressful and conflictual. Unsurprisingly, when viewing television, children with ADHD can sit for prolonged periods relatively quietly, and it may be that their parents, therefore, support and encourage television watching as one of the few pastimes where parents and child can enjoy some comparatively conflict-free time. Such parent-child conflict might account for the higher percentage of such children who have televisions in their bedrooms as well. Notwithstanding the possible influence of such dynamics, the researchers nevertheless report that children with ADHD are first read to at an older age than their non-referred peers, and are also the recipients of relatively fewer prekindergarten educational experiences (learning what a rhyme is, for example), which clearly suggests that they are the products of their culture as much as of their genes. Appropriately, therefore, as Sigman (2007) observes, the American Medical Association now requires its paediatricians ‘to assess viewing habits when treating all hyperactive children’ (p. 16) and, importantly, he notes too that it is not just our ability to read that is compromised when our attention becomes damaged, but also our aptitude for learning language, completing school work, sitting exams, performing on the job, and relating to others in a healthy way; ultimately, thus, even our sense of identity is affected (pp. 17-18). Whither Writing? The great American philosopher of education John Dewey observed that ‘we learn what we do’, and relating to this, an 18-member panel of educators comprising the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges issued a report in 2003 concluding that, of the so-called three ‘Rs’ in American classrooms, writing was that which was most neglected. According to the report, most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing – that is, roughly 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Of high school seniors, 75 percent never get a writing assignment from their social studies or history teachers, and while only about half of the nation’s twelfth graders report being regularly assigned essays of three or more pages in English class, approximately 4 in 10 say they never (or hardly ever) receive such assignments. Teachers, according to the report, have also been abandoning what was once a senior-year rite of passage – the extended research paper. That reading and grading even a weekly one-page paper per student would introduce a significant task for them certainly represents part of the problem, according to the panel, especially given that many American high school teachers each have between 120 and 263
Phil Rose 200 students. Despite the likelihood that students are thankful their lives are also not burdened with such activities, the panel recommends that the amount of time students spend on writing be doubled, that it be taught at all grade levels and in all subjects, and that every school district devise ‘a writing plan’. Nor is it just college professors who have been alarmed by the poor writing skills of most American students. The National Commission also surveyed 120 American corporations in the mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, finance, insurance, real estate and service industries. Concluding that one third of employees in American blue-chip companies are poor writers, the panel also found that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. Aside from creating problems related to reports and other texts, this phenomenon is also presenting other difficulties, since in many businesses emails are replacing the phone for much workplace communication. Corporate computers, however, are purportedly being clogged by millions of incomprehensible email messages – chaotic requests for clarification and counter-clarification – resulting in ongoing cycles of confusion. Poor email communication has apparently even transformed minor business snarls into corporate conflagrations approaching litigation. It will be interesting to see whether the prominence of email use continues as the digital technological environment evolves, but the importance of the issue to business is also signalled by a recent Toronto Dominion Bank study of literacy in the Canadian context, published perhaps in response to the Canadian government’s slashing of adult literacy programs shortly after it came to power in 2006. Of course, like many of their working parents, most students at the secondary and postsecondary levels of education today ‘write’ on the computer, and therefore we must not fail to take into account the migration of typing and printing to the screen. ‘If video displays independent of the content excite one set of brainwave patterns, which is completely different from that produced by reading,’ observes Robert Logan (2004), also citing Krugman’s experiments, ‘it is apparent that the extensive use of a CRT [cathode-ray tube] can result in stress’ (p. 224), a stress that results from our attempts to employ the left-brain patterns required of reading while using a medium that instead purportedly promotes right-brain patterns. Indeed, I myself have come to believe that the central serous retinopathy which has developed in one of my eyes over the last few years – a condition said to result from stress – may be directly related to extensive reading and writing on the screen. The mosaic of tiny dots or ‘pixels’ that comprise the cathode-ray tube make it difficult for the eye accurately to focus upon words on the computer screen because, in contrast to the printed word, its relatively poor definition causes focus to drift back and forth. While looking at the computer for long periods of time, this repetitive focusing effort goes on continuously and subconsciously for the eyes, and some liken this to the eye muscles doing thousands of push-ups per day. Though the cathode-ray tube monitor seems on its way to becoming obsolete for both computers and televisions as Logan notes, we need to do much work in order to discover the vastly under-investigated effects of other display media, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) and liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Whereas the cathode-ray tube uses a gun that fires electrons in a heavy glass tube to light phosphors, plasma uses special gases to light the screen, and LCDs affix liquid crystals to thin plates of glass. So what are we to make of the findings of the first World Internet Project report, which – on top of concluding that typical Internet users are spending more time engaged in social activities than non-users – concludes that they are also avid readers? Released early in 2004 and directed by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the study was the first of its kind, and its findings are derived from surveys of Internet and non-Internet users in the following 14 countries: the United States, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Macao, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China and Chile. Significantly, the study found that television viewing everywhere was down for Internet users compared with their Net-abstaining peers, sometimes by as much as five hours per week. This latter trend was uncovered also by a 2005 Forrester Research study, ‘The State of Consumers and Technology: Benchmark 2005’, which found that North American broadband Internet surfers generally watch 2 fewer hours of television per week than do those without Internet access. While those using a dial-up connection watch 1.5 hours less, the study notes that the number of broadband households in the United States is expected to soar exponentially for some time to come. Interestingly, the Forrester study claims that while the typographic forms of newspapers and magazines also suffer slightly from Internet competition, 264
Digital (A)Literacy radio and video games do not. Certainly, we are also going to have to bring into this equation a number of recent advances in televisuality, particularly the fact that screen culture has gone mobile. We now commonly see mini-cinemas in the back seats of family vehicles, for example, while portability found renewed meaning beyond the laptop in the 2005 Apple and Disney release of the video iPod with which one can access items from the latter’s television content via iTunes. Since then, of course, literacy’s technological extensions have responded with the iPad and the Kindle, and their presence adds further complexity to our media ecology. It may have been Daniel Boorstin (1984) who coined the term ‘aliterate’ to describe the growing number of individuals who can read but generally do not, or who do so only under compulsion. Clearly, the media environment has changed substantially since Boorstin’s time. But whether or not some ecological balance can be struck within it to allow for a type of ‘secondary literacy’ to emerge – beyond depending on the relative popularity of the iPad compared with the video iPod – such equilibrium may also depend on whether the multimedia ‘biases’ of the iPad and personal computer, to employ the terms of Postman (1985), come to be drawn more within the ambit of the epistemology of television, or more towards that of print. That is to say, such ecological balance will depend on what uses people are making of their computers and the Internet. Will people’s computer usage draw them more towards content that mimes the symbolic form of television, as with the playing of some video games, or the posting and watching of materials on the YouTubes of the world? Or will it more reflect participation in newsgroups, chatrooms, listservs, Web CT, the reading and writing of blogs, and the sending and receiving of emails and instant messages? Since it is common at the moment to see advertisements employing moving images in the midst of much text-based Internet content – including on the websites of what we once called ‘newspapers’ – it is evident that our digital culture is not certain in which direction it wishes to go. The fundamental opposition that this combination involves, however, is partially the reason that Google, which uses only text for its web advertisements, has had such tremendous success in its apparent attempts to act as a counterforce to these tendencies. Aside from the bit rate on text being very fast, it also has the highest information density, allowing users to scan lots of information at the highest speed – the reason that Google does not allow advertisers to use capital letters, which we are said to read 30 percent slower than properly capitalized words (Stross, 2005). It’s worth noting too, however, as does Ziming Liu (2005), that reading from a computer monitor is up to 30 percent slower than reading the same text from the printed page. Moreover, reading on a screen, he observes, ‘is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, non-linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in-depth reading, and concentrated reading’ (Liu, 2005, p. 700). That the National Commission on Writing has discovered the extended research paper’s demise in America’s high schools would not at all have surprised Postman, who was well acquainted with the observation by the Canadian communications scholar Harold Innis that electronic people were on their way to becoming enemies of time. In this relation, we have recognized how writing assignments are time-consuming not only for teachers but for students as well. As Wolf makes clear, nonetheless, the ‘secret gift’ that lies at the basis of the writing and reading brain is ‘time to think’, and it was this gift, she suggests, which provided the initial cognitive platform for our species’ development of intellectual skills such as ‘documentation, codification, classification, organization, interiorization of language, consciousness of self and others, and consciousness of consciousness itself’ (Wolf, 2007, p. 221). Relevant here, too, are Clay’s (1991) observations regarding the bewilderment that average and low-progress readers betray before more complex print stimuli; the diminished effort they seem capable of demonstrating in the identification and relation of the various cues; and how such students process these cues not just less accurately, but more slowly. In contrast, the characteristics of children who make good progress in their first year of reading are the possession of the ‘courage to make mistakes, the “ear” to recognize that an error had occurred [and] the patience to search for confirmation’ (Clay, 1991, p. 304). For the child whose consciousness has been habituated to televisual media, however, confronting the sensually impoverished environment of the written or printed page, and the perceptual self-denial this experience entails, can represent a monumental cultural challenge. It is worth further exploring in this regard the aforementioned suggestion – as Jonathan Crary (2001) argues, for instance – that the recent proliferation of diagnoses of ADHD and other 265
Phil Rose problems is a natural reaction to today’s electronic environment. ‘In a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload,’ he writes, ‘it is nonsensical to pathologize these forms of behavior or look for the causes of this imaginary disorder in neurochemistry, brain anatomy, and genetic predisposition’ (p. 36).[2] Indeed, for Crary, identifying young children and others with ADHD amounts to a conspiracy of institutional power to control the behaviour of those who are otherwise unmanageable, a goal frequently achieved using the ‘disciplinary technology’ of potent neurochemicals. Noting how a contemporary study of the condition concludes that what is deficient in such individuals is the control that rules exert over behaviour, Crary fails to observe that such rule-governed conduct is less the requirement of a ‘disciplinary regime of attentiveness’ that ‘the logic of capital’ (p. 13) imposes than something inherently demanded by the acquisition of advanced print literacy. Demonstrating the common tendency for those who purport to study ‘visual culture’ to ignore typography’s centrality to ‘capitalist modernity’, Crary seems oblivious to the fact that our culture and its education system (let alone capitalism itself) are founded and based on print, and that this is what makes the adjustment of identified children to the learning environment of the school so difficult. Reading is highly unlikely ever wholly to disappear, yet we can imagine a future world in which moving imagery and secondary orality have not simply surpassed type but almost completely supplanted it. Would such an environment lead to or require adaptive brain modifications? I have intimated that we would be considerably more ‘right-brained’ than ‘leftbrained’ in such a world, and at this juncture it is worth investigating, therefore, whether this perspective might be too binary in its theorization, when it appears at the moment that it is brain plasticity and the organ’s changing typology that ought to be our central concern. According to Winifred Gallagher (2009): Popular wisdom has it that the brain is neatly divided into the analytical, verbal left hemisphere and the intuitive, creative right hemisphere, and that some individuals’ behavior is more influenced by one side than the other. Up to a point, there’s some truth to these notions, but research on so-called brain lateralization quickly becomes more complicated. The more difficult your task, for example, the more both hemispheres are likely to get involved. Moreover, advances in brain imaging mean that it’s no longer enough to say that function is located in the right or left brain. To be accurate and meaningful, information must distinguish exactly where within a hemisphere the activity in question occurs. (p. 71)
Gallagher is correct, and her point is especially salient for us in making finer distinctions in our chronically under-examined interfaces with the various forms and contents of the screen technologies that we regularly confront today. On the other hand, the point is less true for the psychology of reading, an enterprise which is considerably further advanced. ‘When we recognize a word, the left hemisphere plays the dominant role,’ as Stanislas Dehaene (2009) emphasizes with regard to print literacy. ‘Although both hemispheres are initially equally stimulated, words quickly get funnelled to the left.’ He confirms that ‘[t]his lateralization is another invariant and essential feature of reading’ (p. 76). Dehaene points out also how the planum temporale – located in the superior regions of the left temporal lobe – provides the meeting place for the visual and auditory inputs of letters and spoken sounds, and plays a fundamental role in the decoding of speech. ‘It is asymmetrical, with a larger surface in the left hemisphere than in the right,’ he elucidates, adding that many researchers see this anatomical asymmetry as one of the major probable causes of the lateralization of language itself to the left hemisphere. ‘Not only is the left planum temporale already bigger than the right prior to birth,’ he explains, ‘but the brains of infants are already powerfully and asymmetrically activated when they listen to speech in the first few months of life’ (Dehaene, 2009, p. 107). As he goes on to recommend, reading acquisition ‘probably selects visual regions whose projections to the language areas are abundant and direct’ (p. 167). Contrasting literates with illiterates, Denaene confirms that the former engage many more left hemispheric resources than the latter, even when just listening to speech; and he suggests that the most important difference occurs in the anterior insula, a region close to Broca’s area, ‘the language and speech center’. Beyond influencing the brain’s activity, literacy appears also to affect its very anatomy, thickening the rear part of the corpus callosum, which, as Dahaene explains, links the parietal areas 266
Digital (A)Literacy of both hemispheres, implying a massive increase in their exchange of information. In a cultural environment that discourages reading in depth and in which aliteracy and television viewing are widespread, we might predict the entropy of such pathways, presumably too underdeveloped and insufficiently put into practice to be flourishing. Stroke patients with alexia, we should note, have usually suffered from lesions in their left occipital-temporal region, what Dehaene refers to as the ‘essential switchboard for the reading circuit’ (Dehaene, 2009, p. 102), while the crux of dyslexia tends to lie at the aforementioned interface between vision and speech within the network of connections present in the left temporal lobe (p. 243). Dyslexics who undergo rehabilitation, Dehaene observes, generally experience partial recovery of this activation, a process that occurs also in the left ventral occipital-temporal area, and in the left inferior frontal region associated with articulation. However, as he further outlines: Brain imaging also reveals more radical compensation effects. After rehabilitation for dyslexia, brain activity often increases in several regions of the right hemisphere, at locations symmetrical to those of the normal reading circuit. It seems likely that in the presence of left-hemisphere impairment, equivalent regions of the right hemisphere take over. They contain undamaged networks whose initial function is close enough that it allows recycling for reading. (Dehaene, 2009, p. 259) [3]
Regardless of these fascinating compensations, such rehabilitation for dyslexia, the benefits of which can be maintained for several years, takes dozens of hours of hard work; and though the majority of individuals who successfully submit themselves to this rigorous training eventually read adequately, an imperfect fluency characterizes their performance, which remains much slower than that of their peers. Even if our right hemispheric orientation could facilitate the retention of a type of impaired literacy through symmetrical compensations, we would still be left with the reality of the contemporary assaults on our attention, which, as Gallagher points out, has no tidy centre in the brain where it is located. Rather, it is ‘an ensemble of alerting, orienting, and executive networks’ (Gallagher, 2009, pp. 8-9), which especially involve the parietal and frontal cortices in conjunction with the sensory system. Might ADHD ever cease to be considered pathological and instead be construed as ‘the body speed of the future’? Henry Jenkins (2003) has argued along these lines, drawing on Linda Stone’s characterization of our era as necessarily one of ‘continuous partial attention’. Along with others writing in the early part of the new millennium, Jenkins was a believer in the idea that today’s youth, as compared with previous generations, possess greater aptitudes for multi-tasking, an impressive feat that they perform without compromising the efficiency of their efforts. Researchers have since demonstrated the apocryphal nature of this portrayal, a conclusion that governments are supporting (albeit with insufficient comprehensiveness) as they move to make talking and texting on hand-held cell phones while driving an indictable offence where they have not already done so. Many youth, however, still live under the assumption that they are able to distribute their attention amongst several tasks simultaneously. But they are bereft of the understanding that the way they are processing information is at best superficial. When and if they reach the more intellectually demanding learning environments of post-secondary education, as Gallagher observes, they may find that they have stunted their capacity for serious thought and exchanged ‘depth of knowledge for breadth’ (Gallagher, 2009, p. 155). Gallagher effectively clarifies what else they may lose in the process. Emphasizing how attention organizes our ideas and emotions, and therefore our overall experience in the world, she illustrates how suppressing distractions and concentrating on what we want to achieve is key to our accomplishing anything. Observing the consequences of attention for our basic identity, she discerns that our lives are fashioned from all that we have paid attention to and all that we have not. Gallagher notes, too, how the skilful management of attention is an integral part of formal approaches to self-improvement, and the first step in changing our behaviour, which is, of course, germane to our maintenance of healthy relationships. It being essential to our general well-being, Gallagher thus resolves that the focused life is the best kind there is. Researchers who note television’s frequent cultivation of delays or deficits in children’s language acquisition are correct to note the role played by decreased opportunities for dialogue that children frequently experience. But they generally tend to ignore the neurological effects of 267
Phil Rose watching television, as do reading and writing specialists along with everyone else, except perhaps the advertising industry. Krugman, of course, was the first in that field to comparatively measure media forms, but few have developed his observations, particularly with the more recent brainimaging technologies. And nothing in Krugman’s work appears wholly to justify the McLuhans’ extrapolation that the cathode ray tube, regardless of its content – whether home videos, video games, computer monitors, or word processors – gives salience only to the right hemisphere. Though the mosaic dot matrix of the pixelated screen may orient us in this direction, Krugman’s experiments are limited in their generalizability, especially because he was primarily studying responses to television commercials. If it is true, as some suggest, that we watch television more than we listen to it, then it would make sense that our right hemispheres would be dominant in processing the predominantly non-verbal information. Other research, however, has shown that alpha waves are suppressed (indicating an increase in attention) when ‘subjects are instructed to pay attention to a visual stimulus or when the stimulus is more emotional, evocative, or sexual’ (Rothschild et al, 1986, p. 187). Given the general character of television commercials, both then and now, it would seem that Krugman could not help but find an indication of right-hemispheric superiority. To conclude, I have noted the observation of Christakis & Zimmerman (2006) that we cannot change our children’s genes, but that we can modify their environments. Doing so, of course, requires effort on our part – taking them to museums, telling them stories, or reading to them – but these things have been shown to help increase attention. We could also launch public educational campaigns not only to raise awareness of the desirability of moderating the use of televisual technologies in daycare centres, but also with regard to the disturbing implications of allowing children to have television sets in their bedrooms. In short, the moving image and secondary orality should only supplant printed text if we permit them to. In this regard, a 2010 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) emphasizes that a country’s economic success is intricately tied to its higher education, and that reading proficiency is the greatest predictor of a child’s future educational success – with students who have good reading prowess being twenty times more likely to attend university than their peers who read poorly. This suggests that we need to begin taking not only literacy skills much more seriously, but also those elements in the media environment that interfere with the acquisition of these important competencies. In this relation, I have outlined how some scholars in their discussions of media literacy quite simply give insufficient emphasis to the idiosyncratic characteristics involved in the decoding of printed text, and also how we witness the opposite tendency in those concerned with the acquisition of print literacy, who often talk about so-called learning disabilities without any reference to the character of the cultural environment in which we live. As I have attempted to demonstrate, a more informed and holistic view of how to explore literacy issues would appear to be located somewhere between these two positions, while drawing on both for their particular virtues, as I have sought to do here. We could also reiterate the need for further accessible research on the neurological effects of our various screen technologies to further inform us on these matters. But in closing, I should emphasize, finally, that, as the 2010 OECD report suggests, the issue explored here is not merely an educational one to be dealt with in the schools. It is one which is more broadly cultural, for, as McLuhan (1964) suggested nearly half a century ago, we must recognize that our larger educational project must become increasingly one of ‘civil defense against media fallout’. Notes [1] Annie Moses (2008) also notes the observation of the US Committee on Public Education that over the course of an average American’s life (by the age of 70), ‘he or she will have spent the equivalent of 7 to 10 years watching television’ (p. 96). [2] Crary can afford to suggest that ADHD is ‘imaginary’ and to ignore evidence that identifies how the brain in general and the cerebellum in particular tend to be smaller in affected children than in those without the condition (Gallagher, 2009, p. 167) because, as he writes, his book ‘is not concerned with whether or not there is some empirically identifiable mental or neurological capacity for attention’. Rather, he suggests, ‘[i]t is an object for me only in terms of this massive accumulation of statements
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Digital (A)Literacy and concrete social practices during a specific historical period that presumed the existence and importance of such a capacity’ (Crary, 2001, p. 23). [3] This development appears to be the result of a phenomenon known as symmetry perception, a characteristic embedded in what is an even more fundamental feature – brain symmetry, a theory developed by Michael Corballis and Ivan Beale during the 1970s. Dehaene remarks that ‘although it seems somewhat artificial, the concept of a symmetrical brain that actively maintains its symmetry in the course of learning deserves attention’, adding that ‘[i]t seems to capture some of our cognitive limits in dealing with left and right’ (Dehaene, 2009, p. 277).
References Acevedo-Polakovich, I.D., Lorch, E.P. & Milich, R. (2007) Comparing Television Use and Reading in Children with ADHD and Non-Refereed Children across Two Age Groups, Media Psychology, 9, 447-472. Boorstin, D. (1984) Books in our Future – excerpts, in Books in our Future: a report from the Librarian of Congress to the Congress, pp. 358-374. Library of Congress. Bruce, B.C. (2003) What is Literacy in the Information Age? in B. Bruce (Ed.) Literacy in the Information Age: enquiries into meaning making with new technologies, pp. 327-338. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Christakis, D. & Zimmerman, F. (2006) The Elephant in the Living Room: make television work for your kids. New York: Rodale. Christakis, D., Zimmerman, F., DiGiuseppe, D. & McCarty, C. (2004) Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attention Problems in Children, Pediatrics, 113, 4, 708-713. http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.113.4.708 Clay, M. (1991) Becoming Literate: the construction of inner control. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Crary, J. (2001) Suspensions of Perception: attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dehaene, S. (2009) Reading in the Brain: the science and evolution of a human invention. New York: Viking. Gallagher, W. (2009) Rapt: attention and the focused life. New York: Penguin. Hancox, R., Milne, B. & Poulton, R. (2005) Association of Television Viewing during Childhood with Poor Educational Achievement, Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 159, 614-618. http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archpedi.159.7.614 Hooper, Marie-Louise & Chang, Pengkwei (1998) Comparison of Demands of Sustained Attentional Events between Public and Private Children’s Television Programs, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86, 431-434. Huston, A. & Wright, J. (1983) Children’s Processing of Television: the informative functions of formal features, in J. Bryant & D. Anderson (Eds) Children’s Understanding of Television: research on attention and comprehension. New York & London: Academic Press. Jenkins, H. (2003) Videogame Virtue, Technology Review, 1 August. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13265/ Koolstra, C., Van Zanten, J., Lucassen, N. & Ishaak, N. (2004) The Formal Pace of Sesame Street over 26 Years, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 99, 354-360. Krugman, H. (1971) Brain Wave Measures of Media Involvement, Journal of Advertising Research, 11(1), 3-9. Lanham, R. (1993) The Electronic Word: democracy, technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liu, Z. (2005) Reading Behavior in the Digital Environment: Changes in Reading Behavior over the Past Ten Years, Journal of Documentation, 61(6), 700-712. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00220410510632040 Logan, R. (2004) The Alphabet Effect. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: the extensions of man. New York: Mentor. McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988) Laws of Media: the new science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Meltz, B. (2007) Study Finds Heavy TV Viewing by Babies, Chicago Tribune, 29 May. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-babiesmay29,1,6392905.story?coll=chinewsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true Moses, A. (2008) Impacts of Television Viewing on Young Children’s Literacy Development in the USA: a review of the literature, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 8(1), 67-102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468798407087162
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Phil Rose National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges (2003) The Neglected ‘R’: the need for a writing revolution. College Board. http://www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/neglectedr.pdf Ong, W. (1967) The Presence of the Word: some prolegomena for cultural and religious history. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy: the technologizing of the word. London: Routledge. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2010) Pathways to Success: how knowledge and skills at age 15 shape future lives in Canada. Secretary-General. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/59/35/44574748.pdf Postman, N. (1979) Teaching as a Conserving Activity. New York: Delacorte Press. Postman, N. (1982) The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press. Postman, N. (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin. Ritchie, D., Price, V. & Roberts, D. (1987) Television, Reading, and Reading Achievement: a reappraisal, Communication Research, 14, 292-315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009365087014003002 Rothschild, M., Thorson, E., Reeves, B., Hirsch, J. & Goldstein, R. (1986) EEG Activity and the Processing of Television Commercials, Communication Research, 13, 182-220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009365086013002003 Sigman (2007) Remotely Controlled: how television is damaging our lives. London: Vermilion. Snyder, I. (1998) Page to Screen, Page to Screen: taking literacy into the electronic era, pp. xx-xxxvi. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203201220 Stross, R. (2005) How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web, New York Times, 20 November. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/business/yourmoney/20digi.html?ex=1290142800&en=8dfa1d 5415f0b05d&ei=5090 Wolf, M. (2007) Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain. New York: Harper Collins. Zimmerman, F.J. & Christakis, D. (2005) Children’s Television Viewing and Cognitive Outcomes. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 159(7), 619-625. http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archpedi.159.7.619 Zimmerman, F.J. & Christakis, D. (2007) Associations between Content Types of Early Media Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems, Pediatrics, 120, 986-992. http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2006-3322
PHIL ROSE teaches in the Department of Communication Studies at Toronto’s York University and is interested in issues related to literacy and other aspects of media ecology, particularly the history of technology – including the evolution and history of symbol systems and communications media (from the origins of symbolic thought to the most recent technological developments); popular music forms; and issues surrounding violence as both communication and technique. Correspondence: Dr Phil Rose, 62 Olive Street, Grimsby, Ontario L3M 2C4, Canada (dr.philrose@gmail.com).
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