THE CLiC MANIFESTO

Technology Matters

Over the past two decades, the appropriate use of computer technology has become one of the hallmarks of an educated person. (Brian Huot, College English, 2007)

Eric Carter is a high school dropout. As you've heard and seen, his in-school struggles were profound. Writing using the traditional technologies (pen/paper) has always been hard for him, and he still avoids reading anything in the "page-bound texts" (Johnson) so coveted in academic settings. In fact, even today, he can hardly pick up a pen to write out a birthday greeting without second guessing himself.

However, using digital technologies, Eric--now in his mid-thirties--reads and writes all the time. Despite the discomfort that Eric experienced in school, despite dropping out of high school, despite the fact that his brief foray into an area community college proved to be, in his words, “the same old shit all over again,” he’s now doing pretty well for himself. Despite the fact that his failures in school—especially with respect to traditional forms of literacy—should have predicted his failure in life, he has, for all intents and purposes, achieved that coveted American Dream. A high-paying job in the computer industry, a newly purchased home. He’s recently married his long-time girlfriend. In life beyond school, Eric has developed the "capacity to amalgamate new reading and writing practices in response to rapid social change” (Brandt, "Accumulating Literacy," 651). In life beyond school, Eric is highly literate.

 

All the music contained in this webtext and the associated audio and video clips was written, composed, recorded, edited, and, to use the terminology of this community of practice, "manufactured" by Eric--recording as Japanese Seizure Robots.

 

Brandt's Literacy in American Lives reveals the ways in which the ability to acquire more and more complex literacies--in fact, even the value of those literacies once acquired--is deeply dependent upon layers of material and historical circumstances that demand our attention.

Eric's in-school literacy education was woefully inadequate. Still, he was able to develop develop the technological literacy skills so valuable in contemporary society, a society that places greater pressure on Americans, "not to meet higher literacy standards as has been so frequently argued elsewhere but rather to develop flexibility and awareness" (Brandt, "Accumulating Literacy," 651).

But his literacy history further illustrates the important role class, race, gender, and the associated material conditions play in the acquisition of new, valuable literacies. As we've already pointed out, Eric was raised at a time when computers were writing their way into every facet of our lives, into a family with the disposable income necessary to support related pursuits. As Brandt explains, "Just as, it seems, the rich get richer, the literate get more literate” (169).