Language and Learning in the Digital Age

James Paul Gee, Elisabeth R. Hayes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415602761
• eBook ISBN: 9781136825651
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Language and Learning in the Digital Age, linguist James Paul Gee and educator Elisabeth Hayes deal with the forces unleashed by today's digital media, forces that are transforming language and learning for good and ill.

They argue that the role of oral language is almost always entirely misunderstood in debates about digital media. Like the earlier inventions of writing and print, digital media actually power up or enhance the powers of oral language.

Gee and Hayes deal, as well, with current digital transformations of language and literacy in the context of a growing crisis in traditional schooling in developed countries. With the advent of new forms of digital media, children are increasingly drawn towards video games, social media, and alternative ways of learning. Gee and Hayes explore the way in which these alternative methods of learning can be a force for a paradigm change in schooling.

This is an engaging, accessible read both for undergraduate and graduate students and for scholars in language, linguistics, education, media and communication studies.

1

Introduction

In a title like Language and Learning in the Digital Age, the word “language” seems less trendy than the word “digital.” We are rightly impressed by our new digital tools. Their perils and possibilities are new. In comparison, language seems so old and mundane, its perils and possibilities long forgotten. However, we will argue that the perils and possibilities of digital media are, in fact, species of the same perils and possibilities we find in the history of oral language and written language.

Digital media are an interesting hybrid of the properties of oral language and of written language. Oral language is interactive but ephemeral (sound passes away quickly). It does not travel accurately because each person in a chain of communication can easily change it. Literacy is less interactive but permanent. It travels far and wide and it is harder to change as pieces of paper or books are passed down through a chain of people.

When digital media carry language, language can be interactive, for example in a chat room, via text messaging, or on a Twitter feed, but also permanent. It can travel far and wide, but can be changed even more rapidly and thoroughly than a rumor as each user has a chance to modify it, for example, in wikis. We will argue that digital media “power up” or enhance the powers of language, oral and written, just as written language “powered up” or enhanced the powers of oral language.

Readers may say that digital media carry so much more than language. But language itself is and has always been a mixture of sound, words, images created in the mind, and gestures used in contexts full of objects, sounds, actions, and interactions. Language has always been “multimodal” (combining words, images, and sounds) as are many messages conveyed via digital media and, indeed, many other media today.

Nevertheless, multimodality is more pervasive, diverse, and important today than ever before. A comparison between a textbook or a newspaper from the 1950s and today will show that today’s textbooks and newspapers have many more images in them (Lemke 1998). Both textbooks and newspapers are often available today on the Internet where they are accompanied by yet more images and video.

Multitasking is another pervasive and important phenomenon today. Multitasking by the so-called “digital generation” is much discussed. However, oral language has always demanded multitasking. In speaking we have to pay attention, as we will see, to a myriad of things. The same is true of early hunting and gathering by our ancestors. The last humans who could not multitask died out long ago, for good Darwinian reasons. Nonetheless, today multitasking is required more than ever and the ability to know how, when, and where to multitask is becoming paramount.

Digital media are a delivery system for language (and other things), just like a car is a delivery system for humans. Written language was an earlier delivery system for language. We can hardly understand a delivery system if we do not understand what it carries and why. While we may seem to trivialize digital media and written language by calling them delivery systems, in reality we do no such thing. Cars, trucks, planes, and tanks are delivery systems for humans, but they have transformed the world and human beings for both good and bad.

This book is about language in the digital age. So let’s talk about language. Oral language was a gift to humans from evolution, culture, or God (depending on your point of view). It was a gift of true equality. Everyone, barring very severe disorders or terrible social circumstances, acquires a native language (Chomsky 1986; Pinker 1994). Furthermore, every human is both a producer (a talker) and a consumer (a listener) when it comes to oral language (or sign language, for that matter).

Cultures, in all likelihood not long after they first arose, had a problem with this equality. In many cultures, it came to pass that the powerful restricted other people’s rights to speak. The powerful set themselves up as the official spokespersons for the culture. Kings, elders, and shamans came to produce the official and powerful speech in cultures. Everyday people became, when speech was truly consequential, consumers (listeners) and not producers (speakers). They were, in matters of consequence, often silenced.

By the Middle Ages in the West, society was thoroughly organized into a “great chain of being” (Lovejoy 1933) with kings and bishops at the top, knights and lords below them, followed by land owners and tradespeople, and, at the bottom, the majority of the population, peasants. This was a chain as much about who had the authority to speak and to speak the truth and who did not, than it was of internal worth. It was about who should listen to whom. Peasants, at the bottom, listened to everyone else and spoke authoritatively to none.

Writing created a new challenge to authority and struck a new blow for equality. When someone speaks out, authority can easily identify and reach that person to enforce power. But when someone writes on a wall, a building, or a piece of paper, they can be anonymous and they can be miles away by the time the authorities read what they wrote.

Writing once again offered the possibility that all could be both producers (writers) and consumers (readers). It offered people the capacity to confront authority from anonymity and from afar. When print came along, the possibilities just became infinitely larger, since now books could be more easily produced, made more cheaply, and distributed to many more people. But literacy was fated never really to work this way, save for in special circumstances.

In the case of both handwritten manuscripts and printed books, reading was, until modern times, restricted to the well-off, the educated, and the powerful in most countries (Graff 1979, 1987). When countries like Sweden achieved nearly universal reading (in the sixteenth century), reading was encouraged so that all could read the Bible and ministers visited homes to ensure that everyone was reading “correctly” (Johansson 1977). In modern societies, even when reading became nearly universal, writing spread much more slowly and never became universal. Many people today cannot write nearly as well as they can read. Printing houses and publishers, almost from the beginning of print, controlled what could be officially published (often along with state authorities). Once again, everyday people were meant to consume (read) and not produce (write, and certainly not publish).

Digital media again offer us an opportunity for equality, for letting everyone be producers as well as consumers. With digital media people can often bypass official institutions and oversight to produce their own media, knowledge, products, services, and texts. They can easily distribute their productions worldwide. They can make ads, movies, and video games to compete with the “professionals” or to critique “mainstream” sources. Through the Internet, even people once considered “marginal” or not “mainstream” can find many others like themselves across the globe and group together. People without official credentials can debate those who do have them and compete with them to produce knowledge and ideas.

Since we know that, with both oral language and literacy, the ability of the powerless to produce and not just consume was curtailed, restricted, and policed, though never with total success, we can suspect that forces will arise to stem the tide of everyday production and participation that digital media have unleashed. Digital media are still new enough that the shape these controls will take is not fully clear, even to the powerful, nor can we be sure that this time equality will not win out.

Equality is a big problem for all of us, not just those who want to hold power over others. If everyone has a point of view and the ability to voice (or write) it, in a big enough group, there is not time or attention enough for everyone to be heard. Not everyone can get a significant audience and those who do will gain more status and power. So far, quality and truth have certainly not determined by themselves who gets a big audience, status, or power.

The same problem arises in an even more dramatic form with digital media, since today audiences can be global. In an age where everyone can produce and appeal to the whole world for an audience, some people gain a big audience and some do not, since none of us can pay attention to even a small fraction of the production, information, and communication circulating today in our global, interconnected media.

It is true, though, that thanks to how big the potential audience is these days (namely everyone with a computational device, mobile or not, and a connection to the Internet), even small causes, crackpots, and people with rare skills and insights can find a significant audience, though not a mass one. Everyone who loves making doll heads out of avocado pits can find each other around the world and group together as “people like us” or “people with a shared passion” (that others do not understand). Before they felt alone among those who thought they were odd, special, or marginal.

This ability to gain an audience at all, even if not a mass one, is in many respects good and to be encouraged and applauded. Today, people with rare diseases or formerly lost causes can find and get support from others. Young people can gain readers for their fan fiction from across the world. Their readership won’t compare with popular published authors, but they often don’t care, since they are writing for the love of it and adore having readers at all.

But there is a potential downside as well. As the ability for people to find others with the same interests or passions increases, so do the number of groups. People can splinter and even polarize around their favored passions, values, and even political views, communicating only with others who share their passions, values, and views. The irony becomes that in a world where everyone can produce and find an audience, “everyone” becomes not a true public or civil space, but a bunch of groups “doing their own thing.” Equality is further jeopardized in this world when some people have better access than others to the groups whose interests or passions lead to more status and success in society.

Today, despite the proliferating groups on the Internet and the heavily polarized politics in the United States and some other countries (caused in part by the growth in media and group sites that allow everyone to customize what they hear only to what they already believe), there are many instances where people from different groups have used the Internet and social media to engage in large-scale public causes, whether fighting dictators or aiding people in disasters. It remains to be seen how the tension will play out between the trend to split into many different, valued-laden groups and the opportunity for people to organize for large causes more spontaneously than ever before.

We have hope and fear. Hope that diversity and commonality, as well as production and consumption, can finally find a happy marriage. Fear that control over everyday producers will be re-asserted, groups will splinter and polarize, and common cause and a public sphere (both nationally and globally) will erode or become dominated only by the technologically elite.

There is one crucial point we want to make before readers begin this book in earnest. It is popular today for people to write books to say that some aspect of digital media (social media, the Internet, video games, and so forth) is bad or ruining our culture or endangering our civilization (e.g. among many others, Bauerline 2008 or Carr 2010). There are others who think that digital media are a panacea; for example, they think that just by giving poor children computers and the Internet we could close the gap in school performance between the rich and the poor (but see Stross 2010).

No technology—books, television, computers, video games, or the Internet–by itself makes people good or bad, smart or stupid. Such technologies have effects only in terms of how, when, where, and why they are put to use. They have different effects in different contexts of use. They can be forces for good or ill. A computer connected to the Internet in the hands of a child with good mentoring is often a force for learning. It may not be in other circumstances. The real issue, then, is social, that is, who has and who does not have mentoring, not technology alone. The same is true of books and of language, as we will see.

The New Testament (John 1:1) says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” For humans, that first word was spoken. Oral language is our original gift. Written language came along much later. Digital media later still. For centuries people identified the breath with which we speak with the spirit or the soul and the language they spoke with their unique humanity. Written language froze that breath, allowing it to travel far and wide, allowing the growth of cities, empires, and institutions. Digital media have unfrozen it again, creating a voice that can travel far and rapidly among “everyday people” and, for good and ill, challenge the power of experts, empires, and institutions. What will happen? Only the future will tell.

2

Language

What is Language?

The word “language” can mean different things. One way we can think about language is as something in our heads. We can think of it as a set of “rules” in our minds or brains that tells us how to speak “grammatically.” In this sense, language is a cognitive phenomenon (Clark 1996).

We can also view language as something physically present in the world. It is present in the form of speech, audio recordings, and writings. In this sense, language is a material object.

Alternatively, we can view language as a set of social conventions, shared by a group of people, about how to communicate (Duranti 1997). This is rather like baseball: baseball is based on a set of rules and, while these rules are in people’s heads and in rule books, what is most important about them is that they are followed by people when they play the game.

Of course, the conventions for spoken language are not really in a rule book of any kind. Some books about grammar tell us how their authors think people should (but don’t always) talk, while other books seek to describe how people actually do talk. Children don’t read books of either sort to learn how to talk.

The conventions that children learn to follow in speaking are social (Halliday & Hasan 1989). They are social in the sense that we catch on to them, in large part, by imitating other people (though with some variation).

Language can be viewed as cognitive, material, or social; it is, of course, all of these at one and the same time. Language is also something that is both individual and social. Language seems to belong to us as individuals—to be something we can use in distinctive ways—and yet seems also to be shaped by social conventions beyond our individual control. As an individual, I can say what no one else has ever said before. My language, my way of communicating, seems to be my own. I can say, for instance: “Blue cows decry metaphysics on Tuesdays” and probably this has never been said (or written) before by anyone else.

At the same time, my language (English) was here long before I arrived on the scene. Many others have used it before me, and I follow much the same conventions others have followed. I use many words and phrases that I have heard or read before. Thus, when I said “Blue cows decry metaphysics on Tuesdays” I followed a grammatical pattern that other English speakers have long followed (Subject Verb Object). Furthermore, I was influenced by a sentence the linguist Noam Chomsky (1957: 15) once wrote (making much the same point I was trying to make with my “novel” sentence: people can say totally novel things): “Green ideas sleep furiously.” When I wrote the sentence, I thought “decry metaphysics” was pretty novel, but I later found that the phrase has 151 hits on Google.

Other people’s language is inside my head whether I know it or not. Looked at this way, language is a communal resource from which we all beg, borrow, and steal. People talk like others and still each of us has our own unique style (Bakhtin 1981, 1986).

Oral and Written Language

We often distinguish among “oral language,” “written language,” and “language” (as a term that includes both oral and written language). We can even use the term language for “languages” that are not human, as in “the language of the bees” or, if human, languages that are not “natural,” as in “the language of mathematics.”

For humans, language was oral long before it was written. Oral language has existed since the dawn of humanity. Written language was invented much more recently; estimates range from 3000 to 8000 years ago (Sampson 1990), and it was invented only by a few different cultures (Goody 1986, 1988).

All human groups have oral language. Not all cultures have had or even today have written language. Oral language was language’s first and primary form. Distinguishing between oral and written language, and thinking about oral language as in some sense primary, is necessary to identify the distinctive features of each.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Language
• 3. Literacy
• 4. Language and interaction
• 5. New kinds of people and relationships
• 6. Literacy and interpretation
• 7. School
• 8. School and passionate affinity spaces
• 9. Play and theory crafting
• 10. Cats, passion, and expertise
• 11. The return of the amateur and the new capitalism
• 12. Words, images, and experiences
• 13. Three social formations
• 14. Multitasking, diversity, and commonality
• References
• Index