You may not realize it, but at this moment you are reading myriad forms of text. You are likely not a computer programmer, but as you read this written text, you’re also engaging with or “reading” HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) projected by your computer as an image. You are, as we say, “digitally literate.” Our students are digitally literate—perhaps more so than many of the educators in our current system—and the age at which children become digitally literate is rapidly decreasing. Consequently, the need for teachers who are also digitally literate is becoming increasingly onerous on an out-dated education system that cannot teach and implement technology as rapidly as it is developed. (and really, what system can?)
But while educators struggle to adopt and adapt HTML to the classroom, what threats (if any) do electronic texts pose for millennial students? Do students lose the ability to parse literature, paratext, avant-text? Christian Vandendope in From Papyrus to Hypertext argues that images can be “read;” as noted above, while the computer “reads” code the way read a book, your own brain processes code as a kind of image—a webpage. But, unlike text, images are holistic and affective; we encounter images as Gestalt wholes. Words, by contrast, take a kind of contextual work: each word in a sentence builds meaning upon those preceding; each sentence into paragraphs; paragraphs into chapters and so on. As Vandendorpe notes, “[w]hile meaning is a product of the cognitive system, effect is experienced as a change of state undergone by a subject. Meaning is active, while effect is passive” (46). Reading words is thinking work; reading images is intuitive—the reader of the image passively receives, thus raising the question: do Joseph Ducreux memes discourage students from actually reading Shakespeare, Swift, or Milton?
And what about social media? BBM, text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook encourage new kinds of social literacy; they ask our students to engage in contained bursts, to practice economy of language. Emojis, while “silly,” are profoundly complex and projects like Emoji Dick and or Emoji Song Lyrics (below) prove that these unicode symbols actually represent a new language that creates new kinds of texts. Still, where do these electronic forms of media infringe on conventional literacy—literal “literacy.” Or do they at all? Because, frankly, our English is not the Queen’s English is not Billy Shakes’ English is not Beowulf’s English—and I doubt you’d admit that by not reading Beowulf in Old English you are illiterate. Language is always changing: when do new forms of literacy expand the learning potential of students; when do these new forms infringe? And when do changes in the way we speak, new additions to the OED, and #hashtags represent not an evolution, but a regression of language?
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Writing Prompt courtesy of Mike Gyssels, Staff Writer.
