As Luke explains, for the last decade historical and political conditions in Australia have made it a conducive context for critical approaches, which now include developing in students an understanding οf the social nature οf genre as they write within and against permeable generic forms. This article demonstrates how a curriculum can be designed for New Times through an emphasis on critical literacy that focuses on analyzing how texts work. Rather than directly addressing issues related to social justice, this approach to critical literacy seeks to make textual codes available to students so they are compelled to examine the ideological underpinnings οf the texts they read and come to understand how texts promote or silence particular views. Rather than viewing the interaction between reader and text through a cognitive lens, Luke argues for an approach that shows how cognition is constituted in the culture, focusing, for instance, on such questions as “For what kind οf reader was this text constructed?” Such critical framing is especially important in light οf the social identities students form as they interact with multimedia and other forms οf popular culture. In order to prepare students for the influence οf global economies on the distribution and consumption οf texts and other resources, students must know how to read and revise popular technologies through critical framing and transformed practice.
At the risk οf oversimplifying, we want to suggest that Carmen Luke’s and Allan Luke’s articles foreground textual analysis, whereas Alvermann and Hagood foreground audience analysis. In arguing for a combined text/audience approach to media studies, the cultural studies theorist Jere Paul Surber notes that research on audiences in media signaled an important departure beyond a focus on the text itself. As he pointed out, however, “such approaches must not lose sight οf the facts that readers not only produce interpretations οf texts but are produced as subjects by the texts they read” (Surber, 1998, p. 245).
As educators from the U.S. originally trained in a personal growth model οf language teaching and learning, we often feel conflicted about the role οf language arts teachers in negotiating how much emphasis to place on how texts position readers and how much emphasis to place on how readers can reconstruct meanings in texts. It seems to us that one οf the most important roles a teacher can serve when participating in discussions οf media texts is to mediate the text in critical ways, helping students to traverse social and institutional discourses–the discourse οf the dominant popular culture as well as the official and unofficial discourses οf the classroom. The difficulty οf this kind οf pedagogy lies in the ease with which it can tip the balance toward teacher-directed practice. Yet the role οf the language arts teacher has long been ambiguous in that the teacher is cautioned to lead without squelching individual freedom.
Gemma Moss (1989, 1995), who writes about critical theories related to literacy teaching, pointed out that a humanistic pedagogy is no less ideologically based than a critical pedagogy. As educators, she argued, we need to acknowledge that we want students to read texts in certain ways because we hope to have an influence on what sort οf people our students will become. Related to this set οf articles, when we think about the people we want our students to become, we realize that, in part, we want them to use media and technology for their own important purposes. However, we also want them to learn to engage in critical readings οf media and technology-readings that make visible the social and institutional ideologies at work.
We turn now to an example οf multiliteracies in New Times from the midwestern U.S. “heartland” where we live and teach. Our purpose in this article is not only to comment on the work οf the other contributors but also to show the relevance οf their work to adolescents in a specific context, a place not known for cutting edge trends or technologies. Here we offer an example from our research on computer-mediated communication among adolescent females in the U.S. Midwest to underscore the significance οf the contributors’ discussions οf popular culture and technology. In our discussion, we examine the purposes served by a particular kind οf Internet communication (Instant Messaging) in the life οf one girl and her best friend, and we point to the need for new pedagogies that both incorporate and offer critical frames for new literacy’s.
Sam (all names in this article are pseudonyms) is a 13-year-old girl who lives in a small midwestern university town. She is European American and working-class; her parents are both maintenance workers who place a strong value on education and feel it is important for Sam to have access to the Internet. Ideally, Sam and her 11-year-old twin sisters are meant to go online for research purposes, to enhance their typing skills, and marginally, to communicate with their friends. Sam’s mother, who knows very little about the Internet (“I don’t know how to get on it. They have to do it all for me!”), has gendered expectations that the skills will be useful if Sam wants to become a secretary. Sam’s father, who is concerned that his daughters have a fast, upgraded computer so they can “stay ahead οf the game, not just with the game,” has grown increasingly concerned about the dangerous and time-wasting elements οf computer communications, and has begun to place extensive restrictions on Sam’s Internet options.
These restrictions are bad news for Sam. Communication is her main reason for being online. Indeed, it is so important for her to be electronically connected to her friends that she continues to log on whenever she can get away with it. After she comes home from school, Sam generally begins a ritual οf computer communication that, far beyond wasting time from her point οf view, sustains and extends her social network. Sam has a number οf different electronic communication options to choose from as she sits at her family computer and logs on to America Online (AOL) for her 1- to 2-hour sessions each day. Each one οf these options (e-mail, chat rooms, and Instant Messaging) serves a specific purpose for her in terms οf the kind οf tone and language she wants to use and the overall social and practical goal οf the communication. We will focus our attention on her use οf Instant Messaging (IM).
IM is for brief, casual, real-time communication with peers. Through an AOL Instant Messaging display monitor, Sam knows which AOL-equipped friends from her e-mail buddy list are online at a given time and can immediately begin communicating with anyone οf them. Although Sam could have up to 100 friends on her buddy list, her father, who controls the account, restricts her buddy list to 20 people. Often Sam is IM-ing Karrie, her best friend who recently moved to another mid-western city.
Sam finds IM-ing to be an especially satisfying activity that involves her with shared knowledge and intimacies and allows her to observe the activities οf her peers from a comfortable, if not circumspect, vantage point. What has been particularly interesting to us is the extent to which Sam negotiates language and social networks as she electronically communicates with her peers in real-time. Instant messaging, we found, demands multiliteracies as it defines and mediates social status. Although we don’t want to claim that through her Internet activities Sam engages in the critical analysis οf language, we are finding the sophistication οf rhetorical choices she makes during these minute-to-minute interactions very compelling.
Rather than speaking in one voice, Sam is conscious οf choosing different tones and language styles depending on who she’s Instant Messaging. In discussing her online relationship with Karrie, Sam observes that she is not only able to talk about a richer variety οf topics with her best friend due to the many reference points they share, but she also discusses these topics in a “softer and sweeter” tone. Correspondingly, she has observed her tendency to give shorter, more pointed answers to peers she has less interest in talking to. Karrie said about her special Internet relationship with Sam: “The only reason I really use Instant Messages is basically to talk to her. I mean, I talk to everyone else, but the only person I really like to talk to is her.”
The girls feel that their bond influences the breadth, depth, and tone οf their Internet messages. Other audiences result in a different set οf language negotiations. Sam notes that she pays more attention to her spelling when she considers the person she’s addressing to be “smart,” for example. Sam has even copied the “voice” οf an Instant Message correspondent who accidentally got onto her buddy list, in order to maintain the connection:
Sam: This girl, she thinks I’m somebody else. She thinks I’m one οf her friends, and she’s like “Hey!” and I’m like “Hi!” and I start playing along with her. She thinks that I’m one οf her school friends. She doesn’t know it’s me. She wrote to me twice now.
Bettina: So she’s this person that you’re lying to almost…
Sam: Yeah, you just play along. It’s fun sometimes. It’s comical. Because she’ll say something like “Oh [a boy] did this and we’re going to the ski house,” or whatever, and I’m like “Oh God!” and like and I’ll just reply to her. I’ll use the same exclamations where she uses them and I’ll try to talk like they do.
This kind οf play brings to mind the critical feature οf parody that Alvermann and Hagood discuss, citing work by Buckingham (1998). In creating a parodic imitation οf the tone and content οf the anonymous correspondent’s message, Sam had to analyze how the girl’s tone worked–how it accomplished its purposes.
Besides adopting her tone, Sam is also careful to adjust her subject matter according to her particular audience. In order to convey to a popular boy in another school that she is “cool,” Sam pays attention to his choice οf words and topics so as to “get into his little group οf friends.” She also has little patience for the language used in kid chat rooms, calling the speech and the typing cues annoyingly immature, with aimless discussions that never talk about things (“like what’s going on”) that are important. Generally, Sam observes the kind οf language people are using online and appropriates language cues for specific purposes. “It’s just the fact that I have access to it, and I get on every night,” she says, “…and I watch other people talk to people.”
Sam and Karrie use technology to juggle numerous language styles and conversations at a time. Each conversation takes place in a separate window. These windows pile up as more conversations get started. Sam routinely converses with four to eight people simultaneously, while Karrie manages around 20 windows and maintains a buddy list οf 90. In the IM environment, the drama unfolds by way οf multiple narratives and intersecting social discourses. IM communications, although typed, mimic face-to-face conversations. They are peppered with a distinct shorthand lingo (e.g., how r u?)–οften the shorter the better–and the norm is to type and send short, overlapping messages in the spirit οf continuous interruption. IM users, for example, will even type and send a singular smiley face emoticon to indicate, despite the interruption, that they are still listening, even nodding in approval to whatever that person is saying. Adolescents at the computer routinely multitask–doing homework, watching television, and talking on the phone. As she chatted with Sam, Karrie was doing homework, eating ice cream, listening to the radio, and IM-ing 22 peers. Instant messaging, accordingly, cannot by its splintered nature lead to extended conversation.
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