Paper presented at the Joint AARE - NZARE 1999 Conference, Melbourne

Pre-Conference Workshop: Learning Technologies: Superhighway or Superhypeway?

27th-28th November, 1999

Susan Boyce, Head of Library

Caulfield Campus, Caulfield Grammar School,

Melbourne. November 1999.

Introduction: Libraries and Literacies, Texts and Technologies

In the present communication climate, information, literacy, text and technology seem particularly to be involved in a reshuffling process. Libraries are the sites within school communities these components intersect most overtly. School librarians are well placed to observe the changing literacy practices of their clients interacting with various modes of information delivery and textual representation.

With the variety and complexities of digital and on-line texts, including ever-increasing dimensions of visual and multi-media components, the shades of meaning and experience between literacy and information literacy seem to blend. To be literate in the world of digital information necessarily means to be literate in the world of digital communications. So, if I define literacy, in this context, as making meaning in a two way flow of communications, where does literacy end and information literacy start? And if multi-modal digital texts are read as part of our communications and literacy experience, why differentiate so distinctively between form, between print and digital texts in our perceptions of reading? Furthermore, in the digital environment, textual boundaries between information, fiction, literature, sound and image seem irrelevant.By comparison, in their material forms, they are distinctly delineated.

As a school librarian, my research focuses on the effects of ICTs and literacy practices in the school library and the school community. The theory informing the discussion in this paper is drawn from postmodern and post-structuralist approaches which understand systems of language as a means through which to interpret the social and ideological dimensions of communication. These theories assess language, technology and subjectivity as operative in the formation of new social structures and new sets of power relations; knowledge and information are inextricably linked with power, text and technology with subjectivity.

In The mode of information, Poster (1990) argues that changes in the post industrial society can be attributed more to changes in communication than to changes in economy and production - "... what is new in society is a set of structures that are linguistically based" (Poster:1990:22). Substituting communication/information for production, he explains the potential for the ‘mode of information’ to mediate communication practices, subjectivities and social power relations. Poster’ theory is significant because, as a means of social critique, the ‘mode of information’ takes social context and the cultural forms by which information is delivered into account. Following Foucault’s analysis of power in the relationships between social phenomena and subjectivity, discourse and practice, Poster moves to "a model of communication in which the level of the subject is not cut off from practice, the body, power, institutions" (Poster:1995:69). My approach in research is guided by this model. My purpose on this paper is to discuss several effects of ICTs in the context of "practice, the body, power, power, institutions (ibid).

The situations discussed are drawn from observation and experience within the sphere of school librarianship. It is sometimes difficult to critique aspects of one’s profession when they represent popularly held perceptions and practices. This being the case, I have found it useful to employ James Gee’s concept of Discourse to enable me to step outside the professional library discourse to critique it from my position in another, that of my research studies. Gee points out the difficulty of critiquing a discourse from the position one occupies within that discourse; critique is only possible from one’s position outside, in a secondary discourse (Gee, 1993). Even so, this has still proved difficult at times because issues of literacy, information and text are common to both discourses. Nevertheless, reading in the secondary discourses of education and literacy has been helpful in explicating the affiliations between ideology and discourse, that is, the underlying generalisations which I believe influence subjective positions and motivate practice.

In the present moment of communications transformation, the mixed effects print and digital cultures can be seen as competing for dominance. The discourses of both are motivated by separate ideologies consonant with the disparate, but simultaneous, interests constituent of schools as we currently experience them. Three particular instances of school library literacy practices illustrate the effects of this struggle in the changing communications environment: organisation of knowledge, information literacy, and the culture of ‘reading’.

Since it has been possible for networks and on-line services to distribute information resources within and beyond the library walls, interesting changes have occurred in the software designs for automated library systems. New generation, ‘shrink wrap’ systems are more user friendly, offering seamless interaction between intranets and Internet. In terms of design, they are less dependent on traditionally stylized and hierarchical arrangements and categorisation of knowledge which once governed the subject heading choices and filing arrangements of card catalogues. Instead, they now tend to replicate the anarchical organisation of knowledge characteristic of the WWW and Internet. Techniques of key word and Boolean searching have proved to be more than sufficient for generating satisfactory information retrieval, independent of user knowledge of the authority of fixed sets and sub-sets of subject headings.

New generations of ‘text’ in digital mode offer another example of the impetus away from traditional, stylistic library conventions - the management and categorisation of text being elemental to the business of libraries and librarianship. Digital publishers tend to disregard library distinctions between types of text; they comfortably combine fact with fiction and frequently mix textual genres - information with recreation and fantasy, for example - so that conventional library categories of non-fiction and fiction no longer apply. Nevertheless, librarians feel obliged, for pragmatic reasons, to fit these publications (CD ROMs or Internet sites) into knowledge systems which categorise and classify in accordance with long established values derived from a print based culture.

This differentiated arrangement of knowledge, reflected in the organisation of physical, printed texts on the library shelves, still exerts a powerful influence over the school

community’s perceptions about the relationship between text and information in a number of significant ways. The division of non-fiction and fiction texts bestows a particular validity and authority on the information contained in the former category; it also influences different expectations about students’ literacy behaviours, their manner of interacting with texts according to purpose - research or recreation.

In the present historical moment, such differentiation is distinctly at odds with the organisation of knowledge in the digital information environment, yet the difference between these two forms of organisation seems unremarkable to the average information seeker. Library users appear to move quite unproblematically between the two models, either by mentally changing gears, or, by transferring habitual, print based literacy behaviours into the digital environment.

The operation of two distinct modes of information offers a number of significant, if unnoticed, examples of hybrid literacy behaviours, the mixed effects referred to above. Habitual patterns of print literacy persist, simply through transfer into, and alongside, digital applications. These can hardly be recognised as the new and different ‘emergent’ literacies anticipated in earlier times (Green and Bigum: 1993; Lanham: 1989). In school and library literacies they signify an ongoing investment in the cultural logic and social relationships derived from the print based, industrial model of schooling. Further examples can be seen in the construction of Information Literacy and in unchanged perceptions of ‘reading’ and appropriate texts.

While new perceptions and practices appear to be taking shape very slowly in other parts of the school, information literacy has emerged prominently and aggressively in the library. Originally conceived as a means of facilitating engagement with information texts in unfamiliar digital format and delivery, the concept of information literacy has recently assumed a far more powerful and ideological import. Since reliable connectivity with Internet has provided such immediate and easy access from anywhere on school intranets, its higher profile is not unrelated to the fact that information has emerged as a highly sensitive nerve spot in the discourse of librarianship - a territory to defend, the province of information specialists and the subject of a discrete, library generated code of literacy.

The professional literature of school librarianship reflects the heightened import of information literacy. Here it is promoted as synonymous with ‘learning how to learn’, with survival skills, with personal mastery, a life creed - universal claims that could be attributed to any number of unrelated theories or philosophies. In the instance of information literacy, however, these catch cries refer to claims for empowerment mainly achieved through the successful implementation of the process and concepts inscribed in the "Big Six Skills Approach" (Eisenberg, M .B. and Berkowitz, R.E.:1988). This approach has underpinned library research skills, information skills and information literacy in turn. Derived from research based in a print environment, before the advent of widespread digital communications and hypermedia texts, it emphasises behaviourist techniques and the individual learner’s acquisition of a spectrum of specific attributes, skills and meta-cognitive steps. I believe that, useful as its methodology might be for a particular style of learning, it was designed within and for the cultural logic of print. It is an outcome of that particular ‘mode of information’ (Poster:1995). Consequently, it is an inappropriate pedagogy for the digital mode of information; it sits awkwardly against the anarchic logic of knowledge design in this modes; it fails to take account of the different cognitive patterns, subjectivities and social relations that this mode evokes. The Big Six approach, and, by implication, information literacy also, are learning paradigms tied to a modernist, industrial model of schooling. As such, they objectify learners as units of production and perpetuate the perception of information as a commodity to be managed, of knowledge as product; they exemplify a failure to understand "databases outside of the limitations of liberal and Marxist theory" (Poster:1995:67).

The proponents of information literacy claim its validity in the belief that it transcends communication technologies, refusing to recognise the mediating effects of digital communications technologies on new orders of knowledge design, ‘rhizomatic’, associatiative cognitive patterns, on different language experiences and therefore, on subjectivity as well. I see their stance as an ideological one, in service of existing power relations and a desire to fix the subjective identity of the learner in the rational logic of print literacy, thus transmitting the social relationships of one communications technology into another. This currently popular dominant paradigm of a library literacy provides an illuminating example of the tendency to transfer old literacy practices into the new media. It could be interpreted as an interesting mix of the will to domesticate new technologies whilst ostensibly appearing to be in step with recent, postmodern discourses which valourise information as an economic resource and a means of prosperity and success (Tuman :1992).

Earlier, in discussing the distinction between non-fiction and fiction, between texts for information and texts for pleasure, I hinted at the binary value system underlying this division. Novel reading in the school library has, in the past, been associated more with literature and recreation rather than knowledge. In the latter half of this century, a better understanding of the relationship between fiction reading and literacy, saw an about turn in the status of the novel and fiction reading. As a result, many school libraries have been designed with separate, silent recreational reading areas - the physical instantiation of ideological and cultural values associated with the technology of print, and an interesting counterpart to the recent construction of a separate discrete literacy for information in another mode. Both constructions are illustrative of the hegemonic dominance of their relative communications discourses at particular phases in history.

In the light of what has been learned about the connection between reading (as we know it) and literacy (as society demands it), and, conscious of a desire to encourage continuity in reading habits (contrary to the discontinuous style of reading in hypermedia?), it is not an unusual convention in schools for English teachers to bring their classes to the library for reading sessions. The style of reading in these sessions is prescribed as silent and sustained, and sometimes, fiction narratives are also prescribed as the preferred reading text. Whilst most students enjoy this activity, individuals whose different reading styles and preferences require alternative strategies, fall outside of the ‘norm’ of expectations in the silent reading room.

The practice of silent, sustained reading holds considerable value in the minds of teachers, librarians and parents alike. Given that libraries also offer opportunities for ‘reading’ in many different styles in digital forms, the practice of reading deeply at a prescribed time and in a prescribed mode might seem an old fashioned convention, but it persists because of the strength of belief in the virtues of reading. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that these virtues also find affinity with past models of schooling, structures for social relations and socialisation. The social significance of this style of reading can be understood against Lanham’s (1989) theory about the ‘decorum of print’ in whic he explains how the medium of print regulates positions of power in the relationship between author and reader. The author’s authority and subjective position is secured by distance, safe from immediate response. The reader’s subjectivity, by comparison. is not only positioned by the content of the author’s text, but also by the physical artifact in which it is contained. Reading a book requires a stable manner of being, unselfconscious attention, silence, privacy, an isolated state in which it is possible to make logical connections from linear symbols. Compare this decorum with that of school students interacting with on-line digital texts, in collaborative groups - each instance of demeanour provides a point of contrast, particularly in terms of subjectivity and social power relations. In my experience, it is highly unlikely for teachers supervising computer aided research groups to insist on absolutely silent, sustained, individual concentration. Reading for information in the digital environment is usually construed as ‘research and learning’, not ‘reading’.

Conclusion

The discussion in this paper has attempted to reveal a little of the range of irregularities, oddities, paradoxes, domestications and hybrid behaviours evidenced during this period of converging communications technologies - the mixed effects of information, text, and technologies with subjectivity and the struggle for cultural dominance. The first discussion of the differences in knowledge design between old and new automated library systems illustrates an instance of the ascendancy of digital logic over previous cultural designs. Information literacy, on the other hand, can be seen as an example of the projection of the logic of print literacy into the digital environment and as a means of domestication of the new technology. The discussion of reading shows the continuing cultural value placed on print literacy against the ambiguities of on-line reading.

My purpose in focusing on these effects is that they offer the most telling evidence of the state of communications convergence in schools. It is too easy to polarise print and digital communications and to ignore the oddities and hybridisations evident across literacy practices between them. Taking a post-structuralist approach, I have attempted to explain these effects by using discourse, power and subjectivity as points for analysis. Human agency and subjectivity formed within discourse are operative factors in the struggle for dominance between two modes of information.The examples discussed show how discourse positions and influences the subjectivity of its occupants, and their subsequent actions and practices. Poster’s ‘mode of information’ and Foucault’s theory of power in relation to social formations and subjectivity have informed my understanding of the ideological balance between the discourses of two communication cultures (Poster:1984; 1990)

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