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Overview
Historical Context |
Historical Context >Rise in Multimodality The currently reified approach to Web evaluation reflects the longstanding bias toward alphabetic literacy in Western culture. As a result, the book has accrued the status of greatness (for more discussion on this see figures below), while other literacies are still jostling for acceptance. For example, in the academy, visuals have long seemed anathema, with the first conference dealing with visual literacy not held until 1969 (Lester Faigley, 1998, p. 25). As Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher (2004) point out, “Within any cultural ecology, literacies have lifespans” (p. 212), and we are experiencing a rise in multimodality. Gunther Kress (1999) states, “The visual is becoming more prominent in many domains of public communication. From a different perspective, this is to realize that written language is being displaced from its hitherto unchallenged central position in the semiotic landscape, and that the visual is taking over many of the functions of written language” (p. 68). However, despite these advances, students are often beholden to alphabetic-based criteria to sort through information because many instructors refuse to adapt to changes in literacy or to recognize that the dominance the alphabetic assumed was the result of a cultural ecology that is being irrevocably altered, and will continue to change with developments in technology and societal changes. Once again, we turn to Faigley (1998), who sums up the situation best: The narrow view of literacy as alphabetic literacy, which had dominated so long into the twentieth century, stems directly from the limited tools most people had for producing texts. Beginning in the nineteenth century people were exposed to many mass produced images and in the twentieth century broadcast audio and video, but most people until very recently had little opportunity to produce and distribute images or audio or video themselves. With the advent of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s, technologies of the visual can no longer be denied. (p. 20) Since visuals are now more ubiquitous than ever before courtesy of technology, the ability to disseminate images quickly and cheaply has reached almost egalitarian levels thanks to the World Wide Web. Digital technology has made image production easier than ever before—no longer must someone spend hours copying, tracing, or breathing mercury vapors to reproduce images; moreover, in an increasingly secular, diverse society, the multitude of viewpoints represented in those images has become evident. However, as Selfe, Hawisher and Brandt point out in their work, the playing field is still not level in terms of access across racial, class, and gender lines, no matter the affordable costs or supposed ease of technology. >In the Classroom The need for classrooms to examine literacies other than standard English has been explored by Bruce Horner and John Trimbur and by Min-Zhan Lu. They argue to expand composition so that it includes other languages and “design” possibilities, but we could also expand composition to include visual skills. Students are increasingly exposed to visual elements as they surf the Internet, and many times they use their visual skills to determine if a website is credible. What students often do not learn is to critique the rhetorical decisions they make as they select and use websites as sources for their research papers. As websites increasingly incorporate images in their designs, students will continue to depend on their visual literacy skills as they visit and read websites. As Kress (1999) says in “English at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication in the Context of the Turn to the Visual,” skills involving the writing of papers and the interpretation of written text are no longer enough; we need to teach visual skills because images are no longer being used to merely illustrate text. They are being used with the text to communicate specific ideas. Kress points out that the English word “literacy” is unlike the more specific terms used by German or the romance languages: “[Literacy] collects together a vast and quite disparate range of skills, aptitudes, processes, dispositions: and it presents them as though they were all of one kind” (p. 68). From this reified thing we call literacy, Kress discusses our ability to interpret and create images. Visuals, Kress argues, are increasingly used as a mode of communication that was once exclusively dominated by text. This phenomenon can be readily seen in the changes in newspaper design over the last 30 years, in television news and its use of stock footage during reports, and, most recently, in the increase of images on websites since the widespread use of broadband. Visuals and text are used for different purposes, he argues, a position he demonstrates by analyzing the use of images in a textbook: Language has—here at least—the functions of narrating (you do this, then you do that, (if) you do that), of pointing (“Here is a simple circuit”); and still, of describing/classifying (“Transistors are examples”, “they are made from”, “they are useful”). But perhaps the central aspect of information—what a circuit is like, how it works, what its components are—are now communicated by an image. Writing is oriented towards action and event, broadly; and the visual is oriented towards the display of elements and their relations. (76) Here we see that teaching students to evaluate websites based on alphabetic skills may no longer be a sufficient way to equip students to critique and create rhetoric. As websites move into future generations of development, they will—if the current trends continue—incorporate more digital images, video and audio files, and animated images into their designs. If these communication devices are going to be used to orient our way of seeing the relation and display of information, then we need to empower our students with the ability to negotiate these sources so they can critique the information being presented. Kress goes on to point out another feature of the 1980s textbook that broke with tradition: a simpler syntax which mirrors spoken language and therefore suggests a less formal social relation (p. 74). This lack of so-called “high syntax” found on the Web causes the disjunct—having demonstrated the prejudice that sometimes accompanies the visual in a period following the unchallenged supremacy of the alphabetic and also a much stricter, class-based society as a result of global history and the like, the “poor” speech gets hitched to the visual preponderence. So, as written language begins to take on more characteristics of the less formal world surrounding its production, tone and style become more direct, more personal, more subjective, all of which can cause evaluation problems, especially if the information is not a primary source. Many disciplines, such as science, still frown upon active writing and prefer the passive, though many scientists post useful commentaries and create science-related spaces on personal web pages where the information is presented in active, first-person “friendly” tones. Although these blogs, and other informally written websites, can provide our students with useful information, many of us require our students to ignore such sites because we fear the source may not be credible. The problem with attempting to shield our students from manipulative websites by having them focus on sources that are “objective” and “unbiased” is that they fail to learn to evaluate these sources, negotiating perspectives to figure out what they think is a likely argument. Learning to negotiate sources, as Charles Paine argues, is education (p. 99). By having students evaluate websites based on book criteria, and by having them ignore “other” sites, we effectively shut off discourses we deem inappropriate. Sources we currently encourage our students to ignore include blogs, online forums, personal websites, and most sites that do not have a .edu or .gov in the URL. Our approach to these types of websites illustrates our bias for the alphabetic and the objective, but it also reveals the way we approach technology. But were books ever an unbiased source of objective truth? The figures below show examples from the "Golden Age" of alphabetic literacy. Figures 1 and 2 were written by T.A. Faulkner (ex-president of Dancing Masters' Association) who claims "the average age of the excessive male dance is thirty-one" (p. 46). Figures 3 and 4 were written by a phrenology expert who purported to show how the enlarged brain changed the features of a young African boy from "barbaric" to Western as he became educated in America (p. 63).
Our point here is not to look at whether books are more or less trustworthy than websites but to caution those who are still under the impression that the book has an infallible reputation that websites can never match. We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that books are inherently better sources. (For more on this subject see Faigley.) >Two Mindsets Lankshear and Knobel (2003) describe two mindsets people have when approaching technology: “We may use ‘newcomers’ and ‘insiders’ as markers for two competing mindsets. One affirms the world as the same as before, only more technologized; the other affirms the world as radically different, precisely because of the operation of new technologies” (p. 32). Those of us who were introduced to computers and the Internet later in life, at this time most instructors fall into this category, are newcomers to Internet technology, and as we approach websites, we fall back on what we are comfortable with: we compare websites to books. As we seek to protect our students from manipulative and false information on the Web, we teach our students to evaluate websites based on the criteria we feel comfortable with: the criteria we use to evaluate print sources. This approach is common according to Lankshear and Knobel: “Many classroom constructions of literacy involving new technologies are classic instances of outsider understandings of literacy grounded in the familiar physical world (book space) being imported into cyber/virtual/information space.” Our students, however, are more likely to have grown up with the Internet, and therefore approach websites with an insider mindset. |
