“Grounding the Digital Literacy Myth”
Rachael Shapiro
Computers and Writing 2014
Pullman, Washington
Slide 1: My name is Rachael and today I’m going to focus my talk on
describing what I call the Digital Literacy Myth and tracing the myth in U.S.
educational policy.
Slide 2: Frequently when we log on to Facebook, Twitter, and our other
favorite social media sites, we see hashtags, petitions, and various
campaigns aimed at spreading awareness, raising money, or soliciting
collective action in response to a particular social issue. We want to believe
that we can use our digital literacies toward just social action in the public
sphere. In fact, many scholars in the Digital Humanities, Digital Rhetorics,
and Computers and Writing have explored to what extent digital
technologies and their literacies can serve democratic ends. Aside from our
hope for technology to serve justice, we have come to understand and
expect that we need a variety of digital literacies and computer skills for our
individual economic survival and success. Both this hope for democratic
promise and the expectation of economic success are central to the digital
literacy myth.
Slide 3: To give some historical context, I’d like to describe the roots of the
digital literacy myth—Harvey Graff’s literacy myth. In 1979, Graff described
the rhetorics of literacy he noted across public spheres, and traced their
attendant false promises. He defined the myth as “the belief, articulated in
educational, civic, religious, and other settings, contemporary and
historical, that the acquisition of literacy is a necessary precursor to and
invariably results in economic development, democratic practice, cognitive
enhancement, and upward social mobility.” In a rich scholarly history,
Harvey Graff, Brian Street and other literacy scholars have revealed the
falsity of literacy’s promise for ensuring a democratic citizenry and upward
mobility for individuals, describing it as the literacy myth. While many
scholars came to critique these deeply held hopes for literacy, the
development of computer technologies and their associated literacies has
recaptured the essence of the literacy myth.
Slide 4: While educational policy in the U.S. remains a rich site to witness
rhetorics of Graff’s literacy myth at play, the digital literacy myth can be
uncovered within the National Education Technology Plans. : [___3 plans,
notice the anxiety, hope and fear that are infused into the very titles of
these policy reports._____]
Slide 5: In 1999 Cindy Selfe paid attention to the U.S. government’s vision
of an economic future that would rely on our position as the most
technologically advanced nation in the world. To reach this goal, we would
need to invest in and develop cutting edge technologies, we would need a
citizen population literate enough to purchase and use those technologies,
and we’d need a work force with the technological literacies to support
those objectives and to make us the most advanced labor population in the
Information Age. Through her analysis of the 1996 National Education
Technology Plan, Selfe pointed out the ways that US policy aimed at
building an educational system to help realize those national economic
goals. She wrote that: It is primarily within the articulated ideological
relationships revealed by this narrative [about the promise of literacies]–
where a belief in technological progress, a value on the competitiveness of
nations and individuals, and the recognition of economic security as a
national and individual goal are connected–that the identity of the project to
expand technological literacy was constituted in our culture. (122-3)
Slide 6: The 1996 NATP, she pointed out, contained within it rhetorics that
were reliant on many aspects of Graff’s literacy myth–Specifically that
government investments in the development of a particular narrative about
technological progress that she translates into the equation: science +
technology + democracy (+ capitalism) + education = progress + literate
citizenry (122-3).
While Selfe did an excellent job of showing how traces of the Graff’s
literacy myth showed up in our educational policy at the turn of the century,
I have found that in the global era those strands of the literacy myth have
actually evolved.
Slide 7: In the global era, the literacy myth has become entangled with the
U.S. economic and political agenda for technology and literacy, resulting in
a new iteration, what I call “the digital literacy myth.” The digital literacy
myth embodies the initial elements of economic and democratic progress
yet extends their promise in scope from the individual to the national levels
and from the national to the global. Specifically, in the digital literacy myth:
print literacies become literacies of digital technologies; economic promises
of are transferred from individual upward mobility to our nation’s success as
a global superpower; and, the promise of democracy focuses not just on
greater inclusion domestically, but the spread of democracy across
geopolitical borders.
Slide 8: Like Selfe, I will turn to the National Education Technology Plan to
highlight how the rhetorics of the digital literacy myth are infused within
educational policy in order to help U.S. citizenry to accomplish the
economic goal of the Digital Literacy Myth. The latest iteration of the NETP,
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, was
released in 2010. The report occurs firmly within the global era, wherein the
movement of people, money, and information across borders has enabled
many cosmopolitan dreams, but has also yielded economic uncertainty as
the interdependence of the global economy stimulates a hefty national
anxiety for the U.S. and all states.
Slide 9: In the dissertation chapter where I take up an analysis of the DLM
within the Transforming American Education report, I draw 6 conclusions
about the rhetorical constructions happening in the document. I find that: 1.
The primary goal of restructuring education with technology is to ensure
American leadership in the global economic market. 2. In order to remain
competitive, we need a particular American worker-subject. 3. Those
subjects must be well possessed of STEM skills. 4. Those who have been
historically underserved must also be included. 5. Constant assessment will
make certain we are (cost-)effectively achieving these goals. 6. The state
has an investment in and responsibility for ensuring the above goals are
met, toward fulfilling the myth.
Slide 10: While I attend to the democratic promises in my more extended
analysis, today, I’m just going to focus on the report’s redefinition of the
American Worker Subject as a way to show how the economic promises of
the Digital Literacy Myth are being trafficked through US educational policy.
Slide 11: The Transforming American Education report contributes to this
redefining of the contemporary worker by integrating technology at each
stage of the education process, envisioning an educational environment
that continually provides, monitors, and corrects the learning of a workersubject who learns through technology and whose learning is improved by
technologies and their literacies. As the report describes, “The challenging
and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people
need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show
us how people learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this
knowledge and understanding” (10). Education, in other words, must be
designed and determined according to the needs of contemporary jobs.
Here are a couple of passages from the policy report that give a sense of
how the authors are envisioning a new American worker-subject who is
equipped with the literacies of the information age. On the first page of the
report, they write:
We want to develop inquisitive, creative, resourceful thinkers; informed
citizens; effective problem-solvers; groundbreaking pioneers; and visionary
leaders. We want to foster the excellence that flows from the ability to use
today's information, tools, and technologies effectively and a commitment
to lifelong learning. All these are necessary for Americans to be active,
creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked
society. (1)
Slide 12: A little further down, they write: “…information literacy, the ability
to identify, retrieve, evaluate, and use information for a variety of purposes;
media literacy, the ability to consume and understand media, as well as
communicate effectively using a variety of media types; and digital
citizenship, the ability to evaluate and use technologies appropriately,
behave in socially acceptable ways within online communities, and develop
a healthy understanding of issues surrounding online privacy and safety. All
this requires a basic understanding of technologies themselves and the
ability to make increasingly sound judgments about the use of technology
in our daily lives” (13).
Here and throughout the report, students are cast as future workers who
will have many careers that they will have to prepare for independently
through their ability to be “expert learners” who can use 21st century skills
like “critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and
multimedia communication” (13), and who are digitally literate, including the
following digital skills.
Adaptable, digitally literate workers must be prepared to be experts at
learning, in part to prepare for the unstated insecurity of contemporary
employment. Hence, the actual goal is that “All learners will have engaging
and empowering learning experiences both in and out of school that
prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants
in our globally networked society” (23).
Slide 13: What we can see from these proscriptions of the new American
worker subject is that: The increasingly high-tech and insecure job market
actually shapes the report’s understanding of what education, educators,
and learners should look like, such that contemporary and future workers
can successfully adapt to and remain competitive within the global
economic market—for the good of the nation.
Slide 14: Additionally, Transforming American Education seeks to put into
place the material, structural, and infrastructural mechanisms needed to
reshape American education with technologies and their literacies in order
to reach their goals of maintaining our nation’s current foothold as a global
economic superpower.
Slide 15: That’s all I can cover in this short presentation, but I would like to
insist that the consequences of the digital literacy myth and its economic
and democratic promises are not merely rhetorical, but are rather material
and cultural (as my opening image of Michelle Obama’s participation in the
#bringbackourgirls movements means to suggest). The digital literacy myth
permeates and shapes how Westerners read world events concerning
technology and democracy, how children are educated—and even has
consequences related to political movements and violence in other parts of
the world, as my dissertation explores. The digital literacy myth is, further,
beginning to shape how we understand ourselves as workers, how we
understand the intellectual and creative skills we claim, and how we
understand our part in the global economy. In conversations about the
promises of technology in the Digital Humanities, Digital Rehtorics, and
Computers and Writing, then, It’s important that we understand that state
interests are at play in the prevalence of an ideology that shapes so much
of our daily thinking and action.