Composition Forum 47, Fall 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/47/

Echoes of Distant Voices: A Retrospective on Technological Days of Future Past

Chris M. Anson

July 23, Bald Head Island, North Carolina. I am sitting in a beach chair gazing out over the serene Atlantic, watching for the occasional pod of dolphins that arc their way to Frying Pan Shoals at this time of day. There are just a few scattered families on the beach, even though it’s the middle of summer, almost cloudless, and 84 degrees. Most have staked out umbrellas or canopies, and when they’re not in the water or playing in the sand, I can see them, teenagers and parents and little kids, talking on their cell phones or checking in on social media or snapping pictures and texting them to friends or posting them to Facebook or Instagram. As they laugh and chat and enjoy the availability of 4G wireless networks on this bridge-less barrier island, with transportation only on electric carts or bicycles, the scene becomes for me a vision of all that is interconnected in social affairs—the physical proximity of the families and friends, but also the way they can simultaneously engage people hundreds or thousands of miles away and bring them into these moments of their summer play.

***

In 1995, my family and I spent much of the summer in a chalet in Les Agettes, a tiny hamlet several thousand feet above the town of Sion, Switzerland, in the Francophone southern Alps. It was an ideal place to read, reflect, and write, with no distractions other than the occasional need to entertain my two young sons or drive with them and my wife in a little red Peugeot down to Sion for groceries at the Migros supermarket. In mid-August, I would travel briefly back to the U.S. to give a keynote address at the NCTE/Colgate University Conference on Assigning and Responding to Writing, then return to our blissful retreat in the Swiss Alps for another couple of weeks. For some of the time until that trip, I prepared for the keynote by sitting in a comfortable wooden chaise on the chalet’s patio with a pen and a legal pad, watching prop planes take off and land at the municipal airport in the valley below.

In the conference program, I was slated to talk about ideologies of response to student writing. But I was also thinking about the role of technology in writing instruction and response to writing, which, like so many other scholars and teachers, I had been studying and experiencing in my work. As I reflected on these issues, I realized that our life at Les Agettes was almost entirely devoid of communication technology. There was no TV. There was no radio. There was one landline phone that we didn’t know how to use, even if we had someone to call. Cellphones and smartphones were things of the future. There was no Internet service and even so, laptops wouldn’t become common until three years later. I composed without a screen, keyboard, printer, or access to anything online. As I wrote about technology, which I had in abundance at home, the absence of it pushed my thinking toward the concept of distance, and what it meant and could mean for teaching and responding to writing. Pretty much the only way for us to communicate with the people in our Swiss environment was to be physically present with them. Instead of using today’s technology to text or connect virtually through social media with Bernard, the young boy who lived on the switchback above us, my sons had to be with him. Instead of playing World of Warcraft onscreen with hundreds of other faceless gamers, they fashioned little boats out of pieces of scrap wood and raced them down the “bisse,” a trickle of a stream along the side of the winding road. “Just now,” I wrote in my journal, “Bernard . . . has run down with his dog Sucrette to see if the kids can play. He is here, standing before us, his face smudged with dirt, holding out a toy truck to entice the boys. For now, it is his only way to communicate with them, poised here in all his Bernard-ness, his whole being telling his story” (“Distant Voices” 261).

When I returned to Les Agettes from the trip to Colgate, I began working on a publishable version of my talk, using my handwritten manuscript and a new legal pad. Eventually, the article appeared in College English as “Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology.” Its analysis and predictions must have been of interest to the field, because it has been reprinted in a number of anthologies and has been heavily referenced in other publications—now increasingly as an artifact of its mid-1990’s historical context.

In that piece, I imagined a fictitious university student, Jennifer, who inhabited an increasingly technologized world. In retrospect, Jennifer was studying in what we now call a hybrid environment, partly sitting in classrooms populated by warm-blooded students struggling to make sense of new ideas, and partly connecting to virtual learning spaces. The setting was “a few years” into the future, which in 1995 was somewhere at the start of the new millennium. Technology was innovating so rapidly that Jennifer’s learning experiences would not have remained untouched by then. I knew, for example, that portability would represent an important step forward within a few years of my writing, and I sketched an imagined scene:

Jennifer pulls from her backpack a full-color, multimedia computer “tablet,” just half an inch thick, plugs it into a slot on a vending machine, puts three quarters into the machine, and downloads the current issue of USA Today. Over coffee, she reads the paper on the tablet, watching video clips of some events and listening to various sound bites. She finds a story of relevance to a project she is working on and decides to clip and save it in the tablet’s memory. Then she deletes the paper. (Distant Voices 266)

What’s interesting about this imagined scene is how it underestimated the remarkable growth and affordances of the Internet, and its capacity to retrieve virtually anything—but from anywhere. In the mid-1990’s, any portable technology had limited access to the Internet because it required a hardwired connection (indeed, it’s challenging for us today to imagine a world without connectivity through the air). The Knight-Ritter corporation was experimenting with the production of thin, portable tablets; computers were large and immobile, and the word “WiFi” would not be part of the lexicon until well after the first wireless local area networks (WLANs) were available for home use starting in 1999. Everyone had to be plugged in. Jennifer—an upper middle-class student—is privileged to have a “paid subscription to an online service, her own high-end computer system and modem, and the money to buy whatever software she needs for her studies” (Distance Voices 267). At home, she prepares for a psychology course offered by a corporation whose achievement data allow her to earn credits for her college degree. But her computer (a desktop) has to communicate through her family’s shared phone line. On campus, she downloads a newspaper through a hard connection to a vending machine, itself connected through cables to the university’s servers (and beyond). By itself, this technological requirement of hard-wiring—the equivalent of the “land line” next to the mobility of the cell phone—limits Jennifer’s opportunities to be digitally connected and forces her to be in specific locations when she accesses online information or interacts virtually with others.

The predictions in Distant Voices about the ways that technology might change teaching and learning—for good or ill—were not difficult to imagine, and almost all of them materialized in some form (except vending machines with downloadable newspapers, which online news sites soon obviated). Within a few years, we enjoyed the affordances of audio-visual comments on students’ work; digitally connected classes of students thousands of miles apart; laptops and tablets carried from class to class; research conducted online from buses, trains, or coffee shops; entire courses taken virtually for credit, offered both by students’ own universities and by outside companies. The dystopian elements, however—subtly invoked in the essay’s title—focused on what happens when students no longer need to be physically present with each other or with a teacher. Citing Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, I worried about a future of disconnected learning:

Students may be psychodynamically separated from one another even while inhabiting the same campus or dorm building; even more profound effects may be felt when students and faculty use advanced technologies to link up with each other in a course without ever meeting in person. Although many studies and testimonials affirm the ways that Internet chat lines, listservs, email, and other “virtual spaces” can actually increase the social nature of communication, there is no doubt that the physical dislocation of each individual from the others creates an entirely different order of interaction. (Distant Voices 269)

But the rapid development of social media and online interactive technologies soon washed away concerns about distance. Just as the physical, bricks-and-mortar classrooms remained—many, all these years later, untouched except for the provision of better display equipment—the technologies surrounding and supporting those environments blossomed. The consequences are impressive and encouraging. Many of the worries populating Distant Voices dissipated, like riders at a subway stop. And many of the technologies that emerged since Distant Voices were revolutionary, unquestionably facilitating access to knowledge and improving the conditions of students’ learning. But new concerns, disturbing and unsettling, have taken their place. Just as the effects of distancing students from each other and their instructors were not clear when I imagined Jennifer, we don’t yet know the risks to young learners from their own perhaps unwitting participation in technologically mediated practices that could undermine their learning processes and affect them psychosocially. It’s a new day, with new possibilities and new challenges.

Meet Jasmine, Jennifer’s Niece

To explore the new opportunities and threats of digital technology, we once again place ourselves into the world of a young college student. This time, it’s Jennifer’s niece Jasmine, born to Jennifer’s older sister in late 2000, just as Jennifer was starting college. A millennial, Jasmine has recently turned 19 and is, like Jennifer was in “Distance Voices,” about halfway through her first year of university study.

We join Jasmine on a typical day in college. It’s early December, and she is nearing the end of the hour in her lecture course in Abnormal Psychology. She can see that almost all the other students sitting nearby have their laptops, tablets, or smartphones open, all connected to the university’s WiFi system. The student in front of Jasmine is immersed in exchanges on a subReddit. To his left, a young woman is scrolling through Facebook, pausing now and then to like a post or write a comment. To the right of Jasmine, her friend Jordan is texting with someone. Two rows down, a student is nervously minding the countdown for concert tickets on LiveNation, his credit card perched vertically on his laptop. Next to him, another student is watching a Netflix movie using the captions function to read the dialogue without sound so he can still hear the professor.

Jasmine is a conscientious student. While listening to the lecture, she has become confused about the term “co-morbidity.” Knowing that the professor rarely stops his lecture to answer questions, she does a quick search online. She finds an open-access “course” by Lumen Learning, “Introduction to Psychological Disorders,” that defines the term clearly, and it helps her to understand what the professor is saying. Then she saves the URL and returns to the online PowerPoint slides that the professor has provided and is also working through on the display screen in the lecture hall.

Oblivious to the students’ activities, the professor begins wrapping up his lecture on the co-occurrence of psychological disorders. He doesn’t care what students are doing on their devices. He agrees with many educators that it’s patronizing and controlling to enforce a no-device rule, especially when some students need them because of learning challenges or use them, like Jasmine, as a resource. It’s up to the students to decide what they want to learn. The multiple-choice tests, administered in class on paper (the only context in which he does ban digital devices) and scanned later by machine, will show whether they have been paying attention. For Jasmine, the ability to supplement the lecture with online information in real time helps her to learn. But she is an exception. Meanwhile, neither the students nor the professor are aware of significant research showing that in-class, technologically mediated distractions lower students’ performance and affect their grades (see, for example, Ellis, Daniels, and Jauregui; Froese et al.; Kuznekoff and Titsworth; Kuznekoff, Munz, and Titsworth; Rosen, Lim, Carrier, and Cheever; Matthew; and Ravizza et al.).

When the class ends, Jasmine files out of the lecture hall with her classmates, many of them almost unaware of their surroundings as they peer into their smartphones. Although the physical meetings of the course are done for the week, Jasmine is also virtually connected to it, participating at any distance from her campus (say, during a visit to see her aunt Jennifer in another state). Her learning management system gives her a way to connect to other students in online forums. She can read material on her smart phone and watch instructional videos. Instead of trekking to the library to check out books and articles her professor would have put on reserve for Jennifer and her peers, Jasmine can access the materials with just a few clicks at the library’s impressive online portal, where she can do almost all of her research for her course project. Even many of the books are digitized. She can work with a peer tutor on a paper at the university’s writer center without having to go there in person.

As she sits in a coffee shop in the student union, she peruses some social media sites on her laptop, first reading Tweets from a pop star she follows. Then she checks in on Facebook, where she has 316 friends. Scrolling through and “liking” or “wowing” her friends’ activities and accomplishments and plans for the upcoming holidays, she notices a re-post from a member of her high school class that reads, “The Nativity Scene, removed by the Obama’s [sic], is back in the White House thanks to First Lady Melania Trump. Merry Christmas USA!” As a member of a politically liberal family with mixed-race parents who celebrated the election and reelection of the first African American president, Jasmine is less uneasy about the Obamas’ decision not to display the nativity scene than about the negative image it conveys to social and religious conservatives, including a few people she knows. She doesn’t remember hearing about the removal—she figures that she was probably in middle school then. But like millions of young Americans who, according to a recent Stanford study, are “stunningly” unable to evaluate the credibility of information (Wineburg, McGrew, Breakstone, and Ortega), she passes it by without investigating its veracity and discovering that it’s a lie perpetrated by right-wing extremists and spread virally on the Internet: the nativity scene was always in the Obama White House. For Jasmine, today this story mixes in with dozens of others, some accurate, some circulating debunked conspiracy theories, some displaying manipulated text and images, and some spreading false and misleading statements. Largely as a result of the Internet, Jasmine is living in a “post-truth” world—and caught in its tangled webs. For their part, her instructors assume that the purpose of their disciplines is to pursue truth, but they rarely make explicit connections between this mission and the strategic deception of millions of people beyond the walls of their institution (see Carillo and Horning).

Jasmine is also particularly sensitive to her online friends’ reactions to her activities, as are many of her peers. The night before, she had posted a picture of her desk, covered with books and papers surrounding a coffee mug and her laptop, with the message “burning late-night oil.” She checked the post when she woke up and saw that only three people had acknowledged it. Now, already 18 hours later, only five people have liked her post and only one has commented on it: “Oil? Fossil fuels are bad LOL. Use LEDs” [smiley gif]. She worries that maybe the post was too banal, or that no one cares about her study habits.

Like millions of others, Jasmine is seeking the endorphin-triggering consequence of social approbation and the equally negative consequences of snarky comments, ridicule, or disregard. For far too many, dismissive reactions to posts, lack of others’ digital attention, unwanted exposure from photos taken at parties or other events and posted without permission, and online bullying can lead to deep depression and even suicide (see Miller). As an emotionally stable young woman, Jasmine is not particularly at risk. But she will continue to check her Facebook post many times over the next day, hoping that it generates the positive social response that makes her feel good. She is unaware of the research showing that limiting her time on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram would make her feel emotionally more positive than spending her usual hour and a half per day on those platforms—close to the 135-minute average for her peer group (Hunt, Marx, Lipson, and Young). Nor does she know that, based on a nationally representative sample of young adults in the U.S., an NIH-funded study showed a “strong and significant association between social media use and depression” (Lin, et al.). Nor is she aware of how much time she devotes to social media overall, or how spending that time in study could positively affect her performance in college and her self-esteem.

As Jasmine sits in her dorm room to work on a multimodal paper for her musicology course, she avails herself of the best that digital technology offers. She has been researching the life and work of jazz musician Miles Davis, who her parents played on CDs when she was young. She is using the latest incarnation of Camtasia to fade into and out of clips from Davis’s famous Bitches Brew album, then importing them into a document template to artfully wrap her text around the images of each video clip, which readers will be able to play at will. As she works, an email alert appears momentarily at the upper right side of her screen. She can see that it’s from the director of the math tutorial center where she works. She immediately moves to her email client to read and respond to his message. A link in the email sends her to a Doodle poll so she can indicate her availability the following week for a meeting with the tutorial staff. To fill out the poll, she consults her Google calendar, alternating between it and the scheduling choices. Moving between the tabs on her browser, she inadvertently clicks on a tab open to Amazon and remembers that she had stopped short of placing an order for new printer ink to be sure she had the correct item. A health alert on her iWatch tells her that it’s time to stand, so she gets up, looks outside the window, circles her dorm room, then sits down to complete the Amazon order. But as she matches the item to her printer and makes sure her shipping address is correct, an incoming text-message sounds on her smartphone, and she moves over to the bed where she had tossed it. After texting with a friend about meeting up later that day, she takes a quick bathroom break, returns to her room, and pauses as she tries to remember what she had been doing. She sits down to continue work on her Miles Davis project but feels lost. An idea she had, something about Abdul Mati Klarwein’s dramatic cover art for the Bitches Brew album, has slipped her mind, and she hopes it comes back to her later.

In part because of the constant attention demands from different media, Jasmine is experiencing what Bontis calls “information bombardment.” She successfully multitasks—responding to an email, inputting calendar data to a Doodle poll, texting her friend, completing an online order. But because of the distractions, it’s unlikely that she will ever have the kind of “optimal experience” that Csikszentmihalyi describes as “flow”—when we become fully immersed in a challenging project, oblivious to the passing of time. Optimal experiences, Csikszentmihalyi writes, “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen” (Flow 3).

Instead, Jasmine is pulled in a dozen directions at once, trying to give each task some effort but in some cases, especially for those of greater complexity, less than what she could give with a single, sustained focus. Her need to multitask as a way of managing the constant flow of information, according to some researchers, places her at a disadvantage. In a study of 1,839 college students, Junco and Cotton found that the students spent large amounts of time using information and communication technologies (ICTs) nonacademically on a daily basis; “students reported frequently searching for content not related to courses, using Facebook, emailing, talking on their cell phones, and texting while doing schoolwork” (505). Correlations between ICT use and GPA revealed that “engaging in Facebook use or texting while trying to complete schoolwork may tax students' capacity for cognitive processing and preclude deeper learning” (511). Although students can express confidence about multitasking and know that it is often demanded on the job, research on learning points to its deleterious effects. In a frequently cited study, Ophir, et al., found that “heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming” and that “those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions” (15585). Furthermore, if Jasmine were susceptible to anxiety or depression caused by her participation in social media, multitasking would put her at even greater risk. Among a number of research reports with similar conclusions, a study of 318 social media users found that “increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms,” even after controlling for other factors (Becker, Alzahabi and Hopwood 132).

In spite of the disconnectedness of Jennifer’s imagined experience in the early days of the new century, I couldn’t foresee then how students like Jasmine would be bombarded with digital information coming from multiple sources even as they move physically through space—even outdoors. Jennifer did not experience this “sheer proliferation” and “constant, rapid circulation” of information (Sanchez 23). She did one thing at a time, dutifully navigating a multimedia presentation while handwriting notes on her (futuristic) digital tablet, or spending an hour online researching for a history project (Distant Voices 267). Other than a possible TV or CD player in the background, she didn’t have the resources to move around among different media inputs (especially on single devices) to nearly the extent possible today, as predicted by Negroponte (1995) and as I pointed out in Distant Voices:

Within a few years, the disparate channels of video, audio, and computerized text and graphics—channels that come to us via airwaves, TV cable, phone cable, CD-ROM and computer disks—will merge into a single set of bits sent back and forth along the electronic highway at lightning speed. (Distant Voices 265)

Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and hundreds of other social media sites were unavailable. Whatever dystopian elements came to me in my fictitious educational world, I could scarcely imagine how utterly immersed today’s students are in media from differences sources—but especially how many digital/spatial locations they can visit and how enmeshed these media are with their environment (see Rickert). As a learner, Jennifer was still inhabiting a world where she could focus on one stream of information at a time—an article (in print or maybe on her computer), a chapter in a textbook, and a video presentation watched linearly, without links to text or other media. She might move between two digital apparatuses (her desktop, say, and her “portable tablet” where she has stored downloaded material from a newspaper). But neither device was connected to dozens or hundreds of different apps that could provide still pictures, videos, sound files, conventional text, or combinations of these—and there was no cloud storage. In contrast to my mid-90s concerns about her aunt Jennifer being too disconnected from human beings in her learning experiences, Jasmine’s academic connectivity is not a serious problem because it expands and extends those experiences. But in real time, she is almost too connected to everything and everyone else, and this experience denies her important moments of reflection and sustained learning.

Later that evening, Jasmine has activated a radio station on her browser using TuneIn, a free online radio app. She hears an unknown song that she immediately likes. Knowing that the DJ seldom identifies the station’s songs, she grabs her smartphone and selects her Shazam app, which listens for a few seconds to the song and identifies it as Polo G’s Be Something. She texts the name of the song and artist to her friend April with the message “so cool, no diss tracks.” Then she’s back on Facebook. She sees a post with a link to a YouTube video clip showing an aerial view of the Pacific Ocean garbage patch. Linking to the YouTube site, she is amazed to learn that the garbage patch contains almost 100,000 tons of floating plastic. She reads some of the 282 comments posted by the 235,000 people who have viewed the video. Someone has asked why funding hasn’t been allocated to clean up the ocean debris; someone else suggests looking up a young Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, who is spearheading a cleanup effort with a unique method. She searches for Slat and finds his site, The Ocean Cleanup, and learns more. Back at YouTube she reads another post about a Japanese solar boat that collects the plastic, about a Dutch government initiative, and a billion-dollar Indonesian cleanup fund. Then she adds a post of her own: “People the cleanup solution doesnt stop the problem. We need to be better consumers. Less plastic. Paper straws. Recyclables. Less packaging. Write to companies. Otherwise we just keep polluting and have to keep cleaning it up.”

In contrast to generations of students living before the advent of digital technology, Jasmine is writing like this almost constantly, albeit often in highly spontaneous and fragmented ways through micro-bursts of text. The compression of thought into texts, Tweets, and other constrained responses on social media has been the subject of much handwringing, but more research is needed into whether or how such changes in the dynamics of written communication are having an effect on conventional literacy practices. Elsewhere (Intellectual), I have argued that students’ nonacademic literate experiences online might positively affect their academic learning, especially of writing, if educators work harder to link the two domains, which students often see as disconnected (see also Buck). At the same time, much depends on the nature of the material and interactions. Jasmine leaves her brief immersion into YouTube and the Ocean Cleanup site, via Facebook, having read and learned some new information, having studied visuals and video clips, and having composed a message to an online forum with an awareness of a large and highly diverse audience. She is exposed through her online experiences to what Shipka calls the “potentials of alternative, hybrid, mixed, and experimental forms of discourse” (3). But whether this experience, multiplied thousands of times over hundreds of different sites, positively affects her academic and professional discourse is still a matter of serious inquiry.

As she dozes off to sleep that night, Jasmine is largely unaware of what digital technologies have done to her and for her throughout the day—how they have impacted her literate practices, her learning processes, her emotional states, her development as a college student, and her skills of information literacy. But there is no question that she is not untouched—developmentally, socially, and psychologically—by those technologies.

Into the Future, Uncertainly

Unlike “Distant Voices,” this redux won’t predict the technological experience of a student “a few years from now”—say, around 2030 (and futurist accounts already abound, such as Alexander’s Academia Next). In 1995, it was possible to imagine the pragmatic affordances of emerging technologies, with a focus on opportunities and challenges associated with a fictitious student’s learning experiences. Only scattered alarm bells, ringing mostly from Luddites, predicted any negative effects on students’ psychological and social well-being. And even in my own eager embrace of technology, my cautions about socially distancing learners from each other were mostly speculative. Today, distance no longer seems threatening in and of itself, and in many ways has become a necessity. In a world of current and future pandemics that would have socially imprisoned previous generations and severely limited their interpersonal contact with others, now technology offers impressive ways to continue learning, collaborating, interacting socially, and working. But while ubiquitous connectivity has removed distance altogether and has greatly expanded opportunities for relational activity, it has also come with potential costs to emotional well-being and academic success.

At the time I wrote Distant Voices, students’ awareness of their own practices (beyond their composing processes) were not at the front of my thinking. I positioned Jennifer as an engaged recipient of technology, acted upon in ways both propitious and troublesome. I directed questions not to Jennifer’s generation but to the then-current generation of educators, to whom I assigned agency. How will the idea of a classroom community change?, I asked. How will the conditions of work change with “increasing access to telecommunications”? How will writing instruction compete with online courses offered by for-profit companies? “If we can engage in thoughtful discussions based on [these] questions,” I wrote, “we will be better prepared to make principled decisions about the effect of new technologies on our students’ learning and the conditions of our teaching” (Distant Voices 277; italics added).

The experiences of Jasmine and her generation beg for a different, student-facing orientation. And it starts with a much stronger focus on awareness. As is often the case, commercial technology is leading academia in this area with tools for people to manage their digital lives. A number of new apps, for example, can be programmed to temporarily limit or block access to certain websites to boost productivity and avoid procrastination, including Zero Willpower, Freedom, Anti Social, Stay Focused, and Cold Turkey, to name a few. Other apps like TrackTime are designed to give the users feedback about their online habits so that they can plan more effectively—and the data can then be used to program a blocking app. Meanwhile, the popular press (both print and online) is calling attention to the need for self-awareness and self-monitoring, with books such as Put More Time on Your Side: How to Manage Your Life in a Digital World, and The Social Media Workbook for Teens: Skills to Help you Balance Screen Time, Manage Stress, and Take Charge of Your Life. But in spite of their own advanced uses of technology, educational institutions could do more to help learners to gain a deeper understanding and awareness of their own practices. For example, the “writing about writing” approach to first-year composition (Downs and Wardle; Wardle and Downs) offers an ideal context and curricular emphasis for helping students to understand and reflect on the role of digital media in their lives and communication activities. With its emphasis on getting students to “consider how writing works, who they are as writers, and how they use (and don’t use) writing” (Wardle and Downs vi), the approach might assign Jasmine and her peers to log every moment over a 24-hour period in which they come into contact with (or generate their own) text or other media and then analyze and reflect on the results. In a parallel assignment perhaps done during an academic break, students could forgo all use of digital media for communication and write a similar experiential paper. (For other ideas, the Writing About Writing Network (https://writingaboutwriting.net/) provides a community for sharing resources.)

In addition to first-year composition, other units on college campuses such as writing centers, freshman orientation programs, and counseling centers could focus more strongly on helping students to understand the effects of social and other digital media on their lives and academic work. For their part, writing-across-the-curriculum programs could weave attention to students’ uses of technology into faculty-development efforts and individual consultations with faculty. With enough attention to the ways that their lives are imbricated with digital technology, perhaps students can more successfully manage their relationship to it and make use of its constantly developing benefits to their own academic, professional, and personal advantage.

***

July 26, Bald Head Island, North Carolina. I have been reflecting on something Mark Prensky problematically claimed about “digital natives”—that as a result of students’ ubiquitous access to technology “and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, [they] think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (p. 1). It’s in my mind as we take our usual 2-mile walk along the beach to Frying Pan Shoals and back. Along the way, we pass a few couples and families enjoying their vacations. Three young kids are making an elaborate castle, their bodies covered with sand. A family is laughing over a game of bocci. Two women reclining on lounge chairs are reading paperbacks. We pass an elderly man using a ball tosser to play fetch with his golden retriever. Further down the beach, a group of college students are throwing a football around. Someone is flying an impressive kite, and out in the water a windsurfer occasionally goes airborne above the waves. For the moment, I realize there’s no digital technology to be seen anywhere. There is technology, to be sure: all the elaborate processes that made the paperbacks, all the design and manufacturing elements of the football and bocci balls and ball thrower and its tennis ball, the elegant precision of the sailboard and the exquisite aeronautics of the kite. But laptops hate sand and water, and for now, smartphones nestle safely in beach bags. I’m reminded of Brian Street and James Paul Gee and other New Literacy scholars who point to the situational nature of literate practice as part of a complex ecology of language, communication, and social relations. At this moment, rhetorics are taking other embodiments, looping and conjoining and separating in an elaborate dance of human forms and utterances and motions, and everything digital sleeps.

Works Cited

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Anson, Chris M. Distance Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology. College English, vol. 61, no. 3, 1999, pp. 1-20.

Anson, Chris M. Intellectual, Argumentative, and Informational Affordances of Social Media: Bridging Public Forum Posts and Academic Learning. Social Writing/Social Media: Pedagogy, Presentation, and Publics, edited by Douglas Walls and Stephanie Vie. Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse, 2017. 309-330.

Becker, Mark W., Reem Alzahabi, and Christopher J. Hopwood, Media Multitasking Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 16, no. 2, 2013, pp. 132-135.

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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. HarperCollins, 1990.

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’ College Composition and Communication, Vol. 58, No. 4, 2007, pp. 552-584.

Ellis, Yvonne., Bobbie Daniels, and Andres Jauregui. The Effect of Multitasking on the Grade Performance of Business Students. Research in Higher Education Journal, vol. 8, 2010, pp. 1-10.

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Hunt, Melissa G., Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson, and Jordyn Young. No More Fomo: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 37, no. 10, 2018, pp. 751-768.

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