Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

I follow and assent to Naomi Baron’s central thesis, namely that the idiosyncratic codes of CMC (computer-mediated communication) do not represent an essential degradation of formal or Standard English. She does not, however, see text-speak (or IM lingo) as an unequivocal good: for her there is a threat that students who apprehend this type of  lingo at a very young age might struggle to switch between formal registers and the informal textual codes that they’re immersed in. Nearly ten years on I think that her fears remain relevant, but so does her prescription for addressing this potential problem: conscientious teaching of linguistic conventions, forms, and standards in Language Arts classrooms. I do support and appreciate her call for vigilance in this regard, but I don’t actually believe that teachers, as a cohort of professionals, have ever even needed to have this caution made explicit. Just as students are more linguistically sophisticated and sensitive to register than many imagine, so are teachers able to teach academic register and diction even as they incorporate, respond to, and learn the felicities of the CMC that their students use. There is much room to play in an English classroom.

I do, however, find some disturbing revelations in Baron’s short article; revelations to which she responds blithely, if not enthusiastically:

Participants in focus groups reported feeling comfortable juggling multiple online and offline tasks. Several of them     indicated that engaging in only a single IM conversation (doing nothing else online or offline) would feel odd. IMing, they    suggested, was something they did under the radar of the other virtual and physical activities vying for their attention. (30)

This narrative of “natural” multitasking–perhaps emergent in 2005 but seemingly widely professed amongst youth currently–is one that demands pause. It is true that all significant new technologies encounter an apocalyptic (perhaps pseudo-) humanist rhetoric about the costs of acceleration and some sort of concomitant loss of “soul” on the part of younger generations. I want to be careful to avoid re-marshaling such a line. However, I think there is now some evidence that this comfort with multitasking that Baron observed masks a degradation not in language, necessarily, but in cognition itself. Clifford Nass’s work at Stanford (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/21/0903620106.abstract) and Jiang et al’s at MIT (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040608070625.htm) strongly suggest that multitasking is inefficient, at least. I wonder–at the risk of rehearsing a sort of belated nostalgia–whether the vacillations of the various modes and media of contemporary information technology have effects on the human mind that need to be described in something other than utilitarian terms.

Works Cited

Baron, Naomi. “Instant Messaging and the Future of Language”. 48 Vol. New York: ACM, 2005. Web.

– Peter MacRaild