I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about literacy lately, as maybe you can guess from my recent-ish posts. Deep into Gunther Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age, I find myself analyzing the structure of what I read and write, and especially outside of literary contexts.

Recently at organic gardening class for example, I received a fair dose of bullet points on PowerPoint slides. Not too much, by some standards, but enough that I noticed it. This is what I mean by “outside of a literary context” - I am reading, but I am not reading narrative. PowerPoint is multimodal: there are images and text and sometimes other modes/media. So I am reading bullet points and labels, and noticing whether the author put her most important point at the top or the bottom of the list. This is how my reading has changed.

The reason I’m spending so much time on literacy, I think, is because I am trying to wrap my head around this paradox: libraries are among the institutions striving to undo some of the inequity in our world, and yet, the principal action we take is to privilege a mode of communication used primarily by the elite.

Some weeks ago, I used the example of an anthropological study that showed that certain social groups were more likely to communicate with their children through questions and answers, and that these children were better prepared for school. (Shirley Brice Heath, ”Questioning at Home and at School: A comparative Study” in G. Spindler, ed., Doing the Ethnography of Schooling: Educational Anthropology in Action, 1982.)

So if we know how schools work, is it better to prepare all children for the eventuality of being asked questions by teachers and to encourage their social groups to adopt specific literacy practices, or would it be better to change the social institutions that privilege one set of practices over another? If libraries’ goals are, at least in part, to free people to succeed socially and economically and to act on their rights, is it better to help people learn the system, or is it better to change the system to welcome more people?

This all actually reminds me of the discussion in my fifth-grade classroom during our social studies unit on immigration. Should America be a melting pot, or a salad bowl? It’s the same paradox: preserving diversity maintains existing imbalances, but homogenizing a culture is totally devastating to it.

Hilary Janks, studying English-language education in South Africa, a country with eleven official languages, calls this the Access Paradox:

If you provide more people with access to the dominant variety of the dominant language, you contribute to perpetuating and increasing its dominance. If, on the other hand, you deny students access, you perpetuate their marginalisation in a society that continues to recognise this language as a mark of distinction.

Janks describes a few ways of breaking the paradox down: she promotes curriculum that shows that language dominance is socially constructed, and praises her university’s language policy, which requires all professors to learn an African language. In other words, the people at the top have to step down, or at least everyone has to come to understand that power isn’t distributed equally and that this is largely on purpose.

Now at some point, you’ve maybe come to the conclusion that my argument that libraries feed back into our established power structures is pretty weak. We don’t have just books, we have DVDs and zines and graphic novels and CDs and scores and ukuleles and video games. We don’t have just materials, either, we have programming and exhibits and speakers and reference librarians and buildings.

My problem is that we seem so schizophrenic about all of this.

To begin with, literature is unclassified in the Dewey Decimal System, and classified obtusely in the Library of Congress system. I don’t know that there is a better way to do it, but I do see the physical and psychological separation of objects-which-contain-knowledge from objects-which-are-just-objects as imposing a value judgement.

The story goes that the turn of the 20th century, librarians debated, at conferences and through letters to their trade magazines, whether libraries should offer fiction as all (and sorry for lazy/no research on this, I want to get this post done). Fiction was a corrupting influence, most everyone agreed. The argument was that giving some woman a trashy novel would eventually lead her to more serious and enlightening reading. We make the same argument today about Captain Underpants encouraging boys to read, about Twilight hooking teenage girls on books for their eternally undead lives, and video games will somehow open a world of books, and they are all just as bullshit.

Then we have this disdain for genre and format - we have debates over whether or not to stock mass-market paperbacks, refused to catalog “genre fiction” for years, and I’ve heard disbelief that “graphic nonfiction” can even exist. Then you have the really smart, thoughtful people who believe that libraries should be cornerstones of the community show despise for patrons who “use the library because they are too cheap to go to Blockbuster” (near quote) and dismiss a literature as vast and intricate as film as “entertainment”.

And I’m not saying we shouldn’t make value judgments about materials in libraries, just that we shouldn’t base those judgments on format, media, whether it has a factual basis, the quality of the paper it’s printed on or any combination of these things.

We tend to undervalue anything that isn’t a serious, hardcover, printed book, and the reason we do is that there is a Western cultural tradition that has said, at various times, that reading and writing forms the basis for logical and abstract thought, or self-consciousness, that it is essential for a literate and skeptical society, is owed for the existence of history, that it provides the economic basis for modern civilizations and that written texts have a permanence and importance that outweighs anything merely spoken.

In Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity, authors James Collins and Richard K. Blot (this is the same book that cites the Heath study, above) call this the “Literacy Thesis” and cite ample ethnographic evidence to show that none of it is necessarily true. Rather, they show that literacies are multiple, that they are often intertwined with “orality” and that this idea need to be understood in their cultural contexts and especially (and as the title suggests), those of identity and power.

But librarians are known to buy into the “Literacy Thesis” wholesale. Former ALA president Michael Gorman writes in The Enduring Library: technology, tradition, and the quest for balance,

What I mean by “literacy” (or “full literacy”) is the lifelong process of learning to read and write ever more deeply and effectively after one has mastered the mechanics of reading and writing. These latter activities are mutually interdependent. One cannot write well if one cannot read well, and the more capable a person is of the sustained reading of complex texts, the more likely he or she is able to express complex thoughts in writing. (p. 41)

And you would think I would agree with, because the argument that “functional literacy” is not really the same behavior that academics (or library users) exhibit is a valid one. And the idea that the more you read, the better you do it, and the better you write, is already familiar to me. But Gorman doesn’t stop there:

Any system that takes the best and brightest and fails to inculcate the habit and the love of reading in them is a comprehensive and expensive failure. (p. 41)

Now he is clear that it is the book, and only the book, that matters. For Gorman, literacy is singular, it is singularly important, and there is no way around it. The funny part is that his catchphrase, “the sustained reading of complex texts”*, doesn’t seem apply to own work. It’s 147 pages and fairly linear, so my reading of it wasn’t sustained, and the text wasn’t complex.

*If the phrase seems familiar, you may recall Gorman’s 2005 Library Journal missive, Revenge of the Blog People!.

What’s worse to me though is that he doesn’t bother to prove his point by citing any of the academic works that support the “Literacy Thesis” that Collins and Blot are so critical of. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982), David Olson’s The World on Paper (1994), and Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s article The Consequences of Literacy [JSTOR] in Comparative Studies in Society and History, (Vol. 5, No. 3, April 1963, p. 304-345) all seem to support Gorman’s argument. A disclaimer: Though I’m curious about them, I’ve read none of these and probably won’t soon now that my thinking on this topic is clarified.

So he doesn’t build his argument and this is really too bad, because the rest of the book is worth reading and thinking about. He starts from the thesis that there is no ‘information revolution’ and ends up talking about library values and concludes that what is important is that libraries do good work.

Back to Collins and Blot, who seem to counter:

For those holding the view that some level of literacy is a benchmark of civilized culture, any challenge to, or significant fluctuation in, the conditions of normative “full literacy” or “full democracy” is apt to be viewed as a sign of regression to “barbarism”. Such a doomsday scenario is found in a range of books which see electronic media - radio, television, and now, the internet - as eroding the literate capacities of today’s citizens and, more particularly, today’s children, for they are our current “primitives” in need of literacy’s “progress”. (p. 168)

In other words, we bookish types have some power these days, and we’re desperately trying to hold onto it. Gunther Kress (cited near the top) adds that writing and its medium, the page, are losing dominance, and at the same time the image, and the medium of the screen, are gaining it.

One might say the following with some confidence. Language-as-speech will remain the major mode of communication; language-as-writing will increasingly be displaced by image in many domains of public communication, though writing will remain the preferred mode of the political and cultural elites. The combined effects on writing of the dominance of the mode of image and of the medium of the screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of writing….The world told is a different world to the world shown. (p.1, emphasis original, grammar Australian)

Kress defines a “text” as any communication, regardless of mode. A book has a text, and so does a film, a song, or a gesture. He talks about multimodality (different modes together, such as the images and writing in Anne-Marie’s recent comics posts), describes genre as social (the genre of job interview is available and comprehensible to some of us and not to others), and tries to work towards a ‘theory of meaning’ that accounts for all of those things, as well as “multimediated communication” (e.g. text to speech, mobile to web) “cultural plurality” and “economic instability” (p. 168).

This is why I say that pretending kids will read books if we let them play video games in the library is bogus. If we make meaning regardless of mode, media or other context, then we make meaning playing video games. We learn, we think, we grow. No, libraries should offer video games so that people have the opportunity to learn how they work - fast thinking, quick reading, hand-eye-coordinated problem solving (and increasingly, collaborative play) is a good skill to develop and may be key to a free society. Especially, um, if there are zombies and/or aliens attacking us.

But most of all, people, and especially children, need to know that there is an official government and community infrastructure that is going to help them be the person they want to be, with or without books.

The recent Nebraska Library Commission Rock Band kerfuffle underscores how poorly we communicate this idea. Briefly, a citizen of Nebraska found a YouTube video of librarians playing Rock Band and complained about it, which induced the ire of the state auditor. It shows that libraries offering anything but books can be astonishing to people. I don’t see that changing unless we get our heads together and agree why it is we do what we do and start telling people about it.

All of which makes me wonder if I’m going about thinking about the library’s role in the changing world in the wrong way. It’s time to return the overdue library books and explore some other ideas.