In a “collegial” conversation, a question is raised:

“Do our majors really need a course in new media? Many of the students who took the course said they didn’t think they would ever use what they learned.”

A provocative question … it provokes me at least. Obviously the question is insulting, as when you would insinuate that any of your colleague’s areas is unnecessary. (E.g. do you really need a PhD to teach writing? Heard that one too, but haven’t we all.) I suppose one must “consider the source,” as they say. However, it is a rhetorical opportunity for investigating some of the premises that permit such a question to be offered.

One response is to look at the question of need. Do our students need to be able to translate a line from Chaucer into modern English? To identify themes in Donne’s sonnets? To understand Keats’ negative capability? To explain the difference between naturalism and realism? To explicate the references to the Bhagavad-Gita in Eliot?

When are they ever going to use that information?

The answer to those questions is the belief that a disciplinary education in English creates a general ability and understanding of literacy, as well as a “humanistic” knowledge of ethical, moral, social, and political issues.

On the other hand, new media is “just a technical skill,” just so much clacking away on a keyboard. Much like writing instruction is “just practical training,” window-washing as one of my colleagues once termed it, a chore.

What our larger discipline cannot see and probably will never understand is that its traditional education cannot and does not produce this illusory “general literacy” and that its faith in this illusion is part of the ideological work it performs for the state, along with its “humanistic” indoctrination.

Quite clearly new media is not free of ideology. However, no one is making claims for the universality of new media literacy. To the contrary, the whole point is to ground investigations into literacy practices in material and technological contexts. In its critique of our faith in literacy, new media opens questions about humanistic values and knowledge. From its perspective beyond the limits of print, it offers a new opportunity to investigate critically our past literacy practices.

The illusion of the universality of print literacy is quite visible in the new media classroom. English majors and graduate students struggle to comprehend new media composition. Indeed English professors struggle to understand these texts: “if I can read ______ (fill-in some notoriously difficult author of your choice), how come I can’t understand Web Designing for Dummies?” Of course, if you think about it, there are plenty of texts and literacy practices an education in English does not prepare one to read. However, such texts and practices are not part of the discipline…right?

Well… it’s an interesting point. If there’s a body of knowledge that is basically alien to nearly everyone in an English department, that confounds the literacy skills English provides, and that seems counter to the traditional values of the discipline, then it is probably not part of the discipline.

Wait a second… I forget. Are we talking about new media, critical theory, or professional writing?

Think about it from the perspective of students preparing to be high school English teachers (the majority of our students). They might ask:

What does understanding Web 2.0 practices have to do with teaching English?
What does building a web page have to do with teaching English?
What does Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato have to do with teaching English?
What does learning to write for multiple audiences with different needs have to do with teaching English?
What does a Marxist critique of the culture industry have to do with teaching English?

And it’s difficult to answer these questions when you think that understanding English means being able to identify a line from Shakespeare by play, scene, and character (which is the type of thing that defined English where I was an undergraduate).

Of course our students are going to have difficulty seeing the value of such an education. Of course they will when 90% of the faculty teaching in their major can’t see the value of it either.

In short, such a question, if posed, must be posed in a context and from a perspective that makes seeing the value of new media almost impossible. Some might believe they have some missionary task to explain and teach such things. Obviously this is our job with students, but with colleagues, I don’t think so. The question is rhetorical, unanswerable as it is framed, a statement of conviction.

It’s not worth answering.

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