Inquiries and Queries: An Ontological Examination of the Digital as a De/humanizing Literacy Practice

• In Event: 63.083 - Humanizing Digital Literacies: Tracing the "Human" Affect and Effect in Digital Texts and Tools

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: PURPOSE

Digital is a popular word in today’s world, including the worlds of literacy researchers. Explorations of what might be broadly called digital literacies can include a wide array of topics: multimodalities (Jewitt, 2006), new literacies (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008), transliteracies (Cope, 2016; Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2016), and reference to a “digital turn” (Mills, 2010) are just a few. One of the shortcomings of such scholarship, however, is that the nature of the digital itself is treated as something instrumental or objective (Lynch, 2015) when in fact the ontology of the digital is itself linguistic (Lynch & Gerber, in press): computer languages are created by human beings; they are human languages. In this paper, the author argues that a more critical understanding of the ontology of the computational languages is necessary for researchers to theorize what de/humanization means in the Digital Age.

THEORETICAL FRAMING

Software theorists emphasize the linguistic and ideological nature of software (Cox, 2013; Frabetti, 2015; Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Manovich, 2001, 2013). Software is linguistic insofar as what makes the digital world work is a complex assemblage of human and computational languages. Software is ideological insofar as its nature relies on reducing the complexity of experience into discrete categories and numbers for computation.

DATA SOURCES/METHOD

In this paper, the author conducted a critical software analysis (Lynch, 2015) of InBloom, a federally-supported effort to unify district- and state-level reporting of education data. Critical software analysis consists of collecting archival data related to a given topic and tracing how the ontology of the digital (that is, software) affects how policies and ideologies impact the lived experiences of teachers, students, and administrators in schools.

FINDINGS

In the case of inBloom, it is evident that policy makers’ and developers’ assumptions about students, learning, and education were encoded into the way in which data were collected, structured, and analyzed. Particular, evidence shows moments in the software where designers and developers applied their own values on data structures essential to the platform.

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE

By acknowledging that the digital is not simply instrumental or objective, it becomes possible to acknowledge the actors behind the scenes who make choices about what digital tools, systems, and services look like and do. The digital refers to software; software refers to human and computational languages. To examine whether the digital humanizes or dehumanizes our children and teachers, researchers have to have adequate conceptual tools to pinpoint the decisions actors made in designing any given digital tool, system, or service the way they did.

Author

• Tom Liam Lynch, Pace University