Jason Stuart @ CWRU

NY Times Discovers Internet, Gets a Xanga, Calls Itself ._-tYmEs-_. Polls ensue

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com

Apparently, some "kids" like to go "online" and do "stuff." Oh, Chicago, don't let the East Coasters have all the fun:

R U ambu-textrous? -- chicagotribune.com

"Some state officials" are at "the heart of a passionate debate," which is "heating up" according to the NCTE. I think the debate is about literacy. Because, as far as I can tell, the only question being seriously asked is whether web-reading children are actually literate.

Oh, the Times article starts out all open-inquiry, with its "just what it means to read in the digital age" stuff, but it gets right to the point soon after:

As teenagers' scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading - diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

Indeed, some do. But others don't:

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Do these people know what broadband access costs these days? Hell yeah they ought to give us a discount. So, to recap, the Internet is pretty much the Web. It's one place, and you go there to read stuff. This is either good or bad depending on which group of tendentious busybodies you speak to.

Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18...

Ok, I've had enough. "White upper-middle class kid from our reading area read books good!" Film at fucking eleven.

Anybody - including the "Web evangelists" - care to argue it's the parents who are increasingly illiterate? Take another look at that Trib article. Thirty-two yr old crosses busy urban street while texting. I'm sorry - students need to learn literacy skills? How's that now?

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different...

uhhhh...wait. Counting down to use of the word "cyberspace" in three, two, one...

On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Someone's been reading their Landow and Ryan. Though it's true - the "end" I "composed" was the article on Jay Adams.

The point here is to be snarky. Sure. The news outlet wants to provide narratives that reinforce (or instill, or attract) the beliefs of their dwindling subscriber base. Fine. But this article isn't about literacy, the "digital age" (whatever that is), or the differences between a narrowly-defined "print" culture and an undefined "digital" culture - it's just about the moral panic that analog (paper? whatever) media devices seem to carry with them into every transitional stage. I'd be more apt to pay attention to the sociocultural cues that inform definitions of literacy if the discussions that emerged attended to matters of infrastructure and presentation at any data point far enough removed from the middle-class living room that it actually extends past the schools that the readers in those living rooms attend. And without the "culture of distraction" or "digital media=Jesus" foolishness that dominates both the broader and academic discussions on the topic.

For instance, remember television? Television is like the Timothy McVeigh of media morality. So evil and new in its time, so picked on as event - only to be brushed aside by a newer, more all-consuming evil. Alfred P. Who? Broadcast sets phased where? They're both dead! Long live the GWOT/INDUCE/Moodle/PRO-IP/Patriot/MUD Offensive. Whither poor comic books, also, currently feted on The Valve and such other hidebound traditionalist outlets for print that has funny little brackets! Alas! I'm going to that conference on fan fiction!

I don't think literacy should be boiled down to the output device and reader's immediate visual context. There's nothing particularly digital about the habits - the article is about reading habits, preferences, not literacy - that the children in the article seem to display. And there's nothing particularly analog about the habits the adults display. The Times is laid out using a networked computer in a newsroom. I've worked as a copy editor - I got paper templates on a Mac with ad space placeholders, I used Quark and editing programs and got wire stories off the network, stringer stories via email. Print is not print and digital is not digital because one can easily become the other. I can make this post into a PDF document and I can read a book as a PDF document through the same software, using the similar and different storage media, transfer it to similar and different storage media, etc. We're dealing with documents. If you want to talk about it in terms of paper pages vs. screen pages, well, don't. The only thing this sort of article proves is that, if this is actually the debate, we're neither in a print, digital, network, information, nor knowledge society/culture/economy, but just a bunch of document enthusiasts.