(Re) Contextualizing Computer Literacy: A Call for Multiliteracies and Systemic Change in Writing and Communication

In Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, Stuart Selber argues for a more robust framework by which to understand and articulate the dynamics of computer literacy. Insofar as existing computer literacy frameworks seem to offer rather narrow definitions of computer literacy as pertaining exclusively to the acquisition of technical skills, Selber attempts to answer the call of these decontextualized frameworks with more dedicated efforts to "account for local social forces and material conditions" (23). Selber's framework seeks to increase the prospects for more responsible and responsive iterations of computer literacy that explore the complex and dynamic interplay between matters of functional literacy, critical literacy, and rhetorical literacy. Ultimately, this complex and dynamic interplay begins to address the panoply of considerations that comprise theories of computer literacy by framing and juxtaposing representations of computers as tools, cultural artifacts, and hypertextual media, a move that potently and productively challenges the one-dimensional theories that have come to dominate debates and conversations about the use of computers.

Throughout Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, Selber emphasizes the ways in which instructors in writing and communication departments have neither been deferred to nor taken enough interest in expanding the scope of computer literacy in the ways he proposes with his multiliteracies framework. By arguing for more systemic changes in and around computer literacy, Selber acknowledges that advocacy must pass through a number of different layers of requirements in order to institute real change. Much like his arguments regarding the complex and dynamic interplay between matters of functional literacy, critical literacy, and rhetorical literacy, individual systemic requirements for change cannot be approached in isolation; rather, one ought to consider matters of technical, pedagogical, curricular, departmental, and institutional concerns simultaneously and in conversation with one another.

In my mind, Selber's arguments resonate with many of the other readings we have engaged with throughout the semester. By predicating his multiliteracies framework on efforts to challenge the manner in which existing iterations of computer literacy have remained decidedly decontextualized in nature, Selber rehearses many of the theories that comprise multimodality. In On Multimodality, Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes suggest that conceptualizations of mediated action and multimodal practices require deeper consideration into "specific sociocultural contexts" and "intricacies of location, access, ability, and ideology" in order to better understand the manner in which the mediational means employed by composers emerge and acquire meaning. Similarly, Jody Shipka's "mediated-action framework" in A Composition Made Whole pushes back against a sort of "highly decontextualized skills and drills, linear, single-mode approach to writing instruction," challenging instructors to develop approaches that "offer participants . . . a richer and more intricately textured understanding of how communicative practices are socially, historically, and technologically mediated." In many ways, multiliteracies and multimodality are linked by an impulse to see writing and communication as more than rote or formulaic attempts to express oneself, but, rather, richly-textured, dynamic, and nuanced ontological and epistemological processes, in which composers contribute to the existing wheelhouse, so to speak, of information and subjectivities.

Composer <===> Audience: Communication, or the Twice-Social-Semiotic Exchange

In the first half of Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, Gunther Kress attempts to articulate a "social-semiotic theory of multimodality" through which composers and audiences might make productive distinctions between design practices, insofar as they do or do not promote "competence," on the one hand, or "critique," on the other. For Kress, the current media and communication landscape is far less stable and immutable than previous generations. The act of meaning-making therefore requires composers and audiences alike to navigate and respond to differing distributions of power. In so doing, the composer's interests are juxtaposed alongside those of their audience, therefore creating important spaces in which knowledge can be produced as opposed to merely acquired.

Kress' emphasis on the prospects for producing and/or fashioning knowledge is integral to understanding his overall project in Multimodality. Indeed, his entire schema seems predicated on the idea that the rhetorical choices that both composers as well as audiences make in the course of their representative and interpretative acts, denote or communicate a sort of agency and style that is indispensable to understanding the scope and tenor of the ways in which social spaces might produce communicational and semiotic change at the level of culture and identity politics. Leaving the possibility for this sort of negotiation open, then, accentuates the ways in which both composers as well as audiences might circumvent the "grooves of convention" and perhaps even realize the political and semiotic aspirations of their communicative acts. In so doing, the semiotic work that they engage in serves as a potent and realistic forum through which to re-think the existing epistemologies and ontologies that comprise communication writ large.

Re-mixing Multi-modality

Below you will find a link to the Prezi that Sam Herriot, Lacy Hope, and I composed last week in response to our reading of Jason Palmeri's Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy.



Later in this post, I will look to revise this Prezi in order to integrate Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes' ideas from On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies into a sort of layered multimodal response that weaves both texts together.

In On Multimodality, Alexander and Rhodes problematize existing applications of multimodality in composition studies, exploring many of the problematic and reductive ways in which multimodal composition has been both theorized and extended to the classroom in the past. For Alexander and Rhodes, multimodal pedagogies remain rather flat and almost formulaic insofar as they seem to disregard the breadth of rhetorical capabilities and affordances that comprise the media in which compositionists ask students to compose in favor of narrow iterations of multimodal composition that seem to perpetuate (rather than challenge) standard print-based literacies and practices. In this sense, multimodal composition is effectively hijacked or "colonized" by traditional compositional frameworks, frameworks that filter technologies, new media, and literacy practices through a sort of crucible of textual communication. Which is all to say that seemingly innocent (even transgressive) "techno-inclusionist" attempts to integrate new media and multimedia projects into the composition classroom ultimately undermine efforts to realize the prospects for agency, advocacy, and/or informed subjectivity if compositionists do not take the time to prepare students "to take full advantage of the specific rhetorical affordances of the media they are using" (19).

Alexander and Rhodes therefore seek to articulate a theory and practice of multimodal composition that looks beyond narrow conceptualizations of new media as a mere tool or thrall at the altar of traditional composition, a one-dimensional vacuum in which "appropriate and productive uses" might be unilaterally imposed or determined; rather, they seem to suggest that the virtues of multimodal composition are best realized when students (and everyone for that matter) understands the extent to which their unique and personalized uses of different modalities--whether in isolation or in conversation with one another--take place in and around "specific sociocultural contexts, bounded by intricacies of location, access, ability, and ideology" (34). In many ways, the will to contextualize serves as the coda through which Alexander and Rhodes' vision of multimodal composition can be understood. Indeed, much of On Multimodality seems committed to interrogating the myriad ways in which the dynamic interplay of new media and identity politics continue to rework and transform notions of ethos and subjectivity in ways that really demand more sensitive, concerted, and comprehensive approaches to multimodal composition, approaches that are more in touch with the critical and rhetorical possibilities of new media and the "soft infrastructure," so to speak, of the interfaces and ideologies that students might creatively navigate and manipulate as a way of interrogating the discursive underpinnings of identity in an increasingly multimodal "world."