Literate Lives in the Information Age

by Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher

This book chronicles the development of electronic literacies through the stories of individuals with varying backgrounds and skills. Authors Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher employ these stories to begin tracing technological literacy as it has emerged over the last few decades within the United States. They selected 20 case studies from the corpus of more than 350 people who participated in interviews or completed a technological literacy questionnaire during six years of their study. The book is organized into seven chapters that follow the 20 participants in their efforts to acquire varying degrees of technological literacy. Each chapter situates the participants' life-history accounts in the cultural ecology of the time, tracing major political, economic, social, and educational events, factors, and trends that may have influenced--and been influenced by--literacy practices and values. These literacy histories are richly sown with information that can help those in composition and writing studies situate the processes of acquiring the literacies of technology in specific cultural, material, educational, and familial contexts.

These case studies provide initial clues about combinations of factors that affect--and are affected by--technological literacy acquisition and development. The first-hand accounts presented here offer, in abundant detail, everyday literacy experiences that can help educators, parents, policymakers, and writing teachers respond to today's students in more informed ways.

Genres: Technology

268 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2004

Reviews

[Thara Tenney]

[Culture is] the lived experience, the consciousness of a whole society; that particular order, pattern, configuration of valued experience, expressed now in imaginative art of the highest order, now in the most popular and proverbial forms, in gesture and language, in myth and ideology, in modes of communication and informs of social relationship and organisation. (The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as cited in Street, 1995, p. 59)

[Summer]

I guess I expected more from this book than a handful of boring biographical narratives ("Jane grew up in Town X. There were social upheavals. Today, Jane uses her computer to check her email".) There wasn't any clear conclusion or analysis of trends in the use of computers and electronic media. Also, I assumed that there would be more written on the area of literacy that includes evaluation of information sources, which is a pet cause of mine.

The authors also didn't seem to know very much about technology or electronic media. I honestly took nothing away from this book.