Last night: convergence and what it means for literacy and schooling

POSTER

230 The everyday life emerging in information technology is a battleground over the nature of human identity.
181 What I call the segmented family of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first multiplies the cultural forms of the home. Above all, the formation of the body through identifications and object choices has altered by dint of information machines. Oneiric assemblages of child and machine inscribe the body with a structure of desire whose shape may be difficult to characterize but whose difference from the Oedipal child is certain.
244 Digital cultural objects may be transformed by the “consumer” in their reception. Segments may be easily added or subtracted from the cultural object. Bits and pieces of any other cultural object may be inserted into, or blended with, the one in question. Sampling, the musical practice of merging sounds from several locations, becomes a general feature of all cultural objects. The cultural object thus loses its fixity, and the “consumer” becomes not a user but a creator. [What does such a claim do to remediation?]
248 In the domain of cultural objects, brands have not worked well. [vs. Jenkins]
265 A new contradiction of capitalism emerges in digital culture whereby the urge to sell commodities comes into conflict wit the need for private information.
266 Open source and open content are tendencies within new media that build on structural features of digital technologies. BUT Great resistance is engendered against new media tendencies that offer cultural directions that do not fit the model of the commodity characteristic of modern socieity.

SCHOOL

How much or little is our model of literacy changing, and given that answer, how does that change what we do in school?

If sampling and remixing are now a part of invention, then do we teach these processes? That might mean teaching kinds of materials, kinds of texts made from them, kinds of spaces they inhabit, and ways to design them rhetorically. This is a new curriculum and also connects to Lanham’s suggestions re copyright. In such a curriculum, what are our criteria for assessment?

Do we also teach new ways to read such materials, such texts?

Do we teach the/a theory that makes all this hang together? Is this the site for critical awareness?

In the case of English Studies in the future, do we think of ourselves professionally—as in the profession of English—or disciplinarily—as in literacy studies writ large?

In the case of Wysocki’s new media, do we think in terms of networks (and network as framework) with effects on practices and understandings, and the relationships between them?

Re Payne and Hayles, how much if any is the code part of what we know and what we teach?

In such a curriculum, what would we hope to gain, and what might we lose?