When I began teaching a course called “Writing for the Web,” three years ago, I pictured myself scrambling to keep up with my plugged-in, tech-savvy students. I was sure I was in over my head. So I was stunned to discover that most of the 20-year-olds I meet know very little about the Internet, and even less about how to communicate effectively online.
The media present young people as the audacious pilots of a technological juggernaut. Think Napster, Twitter, Facebook. Given that the average 18-year-old spends hours each day immersed in electronic media, we oldsters tend to assume that every other teenager is the next Mark Zuckerberg. Aren’t kids crazy about downloading music, swapping files, sharing links, texting, and playing video games?
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But video games do not create savvy users of the Internet. Video games predate the Internet and have little to do with online culture. When games are played online, the computer is no longer an open portal to the world. It is an insular system, related only to other gaming machines, like Nintendo and Xbox. The only communication that games afford is within the closed world of the game itself—who is on my team?
At their worst, games divert children from other, more enriching experiences. The Internet’s chief similarity to video games is that both siphon off audiences from television, which will soon reside exclusively on the Internet. As a delivery system for television, film, and games, the Internet has proved itself a premier source of entertainment. And that’s all that most young people know about it.
Why wouldn’t we educate students in sophisticated uses of the Internet, which is commanding an increasing amount of the world’s time and attention? I’m not talking about a course on “How to Understand the Internet” or an introduction to searching for legitimate research-paper sources online (although that is useful, obviously). I’m talking about the need for students to understand and produce texts online—essential skills for life beyond college.
Look at the strategic plan of any American college and you will find an emphasis on helping students “meet the demands of the information age.”
Apparently many professors believe that students’ ownership of laptops and notebook computers guarantees that they will learn all they need to know about computers. But who is teaching students how to write, say, a marketing report or a historical overview for an online readership? I am surprised at the number of my colleagues who prohibit the use of computers in their classrooms because they fear that students will surf the Web during a lecture. An absence of computers in the classroom sends the message that computers are ancillary to learning.
That misconception is due, in part, to the fact that many faculty members are baby boomers who didn’t need computer technology to succeed as professionals. Many of them see the computer as a fancy typewriter, a means of sending memos, and, generally, a distraction. Students write papers on their computers, but those papers are handed in as hard copy. Never mind that the world outside of college does very little business with hard copy. In short, there exists a gaping divide between the college classroom and the world outside, where work and life thrive on the Internet.
How can our students have an impact on the world if we don’t teach them how to use the primary tool that makes such an impact possible? To be fair, some important developments are taking place in the digital humanities, which aims to expand the notion of legitimate research by including such nonlinear sources as videos, digital images, and hyperlinks. Why not augment texts with digital tools? And a number of composition and rhetoric professors are teaching digital literacy. But such efforts remain marginal.
It seems clear that our increasingly technological world demands technologically adept citizens. Start with the simplest act of online communication: e-mail. Recent studies have shown a significant decline in e-mail use among teenagers. Why? E-mail is for business, not entertainment and socializing. Young people have abandoned e-mail for text messaging.
I often hear faculty members complain about the ineptness of student e-mails—whether as queries or as a means of presenting proposals—but few professors seek to rectify the situation by teaching effective online communication. They don’t seem to understand that e-mails are as important as more formal correspondence is, even though, ironically, the professors’ own daily use of e-mails underscores that reality.
How can discipline-specific computer teaching begin? Let’s start with the fact that every academic discipline uses databases. Do your students know how to gain access to those databases? Do they know how to write articles that might appear in them? Are they aware of the ethical dimensions of placing information online?
Those studying social work, for example, should know that all client records and reports can be subpoenaed. Social-work students, therefore, need to be aware of confidentiality laws. They also need to know that any report submitted online will remain online forever. There is no such thing as expunging a record from the Internet. That is just one of countless examples of Internet protocol and online constraints that impinge upon a student’s understanding of a particular field of study.
Every discipline now has an online journal, blogs, and special-interest Web sites. Until recently, online literary journals were considered inferior to their print counterparts. That is no longer the case. My students should be reading online journals, but they should also understand how an online journal differs from a traditional print journal. Online journals make use of multimedia—video, audio, photos, chat rooms—not available to print journals. The rhetorical package online is very different from the print version.
My students hope to write for online journals in addition to or instead of print journals. They may also have an opportunity one day to edit an online journal of their own. If they have not studied the medium, if they have not written in the style of online journals, if they have not analyzed how online journals are keyed to rhetorical aims that are specific to the Internet, then they will be unprepared for the field they hope to enter after graduation.
American colleges sent 1.6 million graduates with bachelor’s degrees into the world in the 2008-9 academic year. Why would we not give them every advantage? As we help students strengthen their knowledge and ability to write, read, and communicate effectively, we must prepare them for the online cultures that will be central to their private and professional lives.
Undergraduate writing majors at my university end up in a variety of fields, but they share at least one thing: Much of their work finds and defines itself on the Internet. That’s where readers go and where markets reside. If using the computer to write, read, and produce texts is not yet central to their identity as professionals, it will be soon. It should also be central to their education.
