Screen-Based Texts Mediate Reality in Ways That Prompt Shifting Relationships Between the Material and Immaterial

• In Event: (Im)materializing Literacy: Making Sense of New Contexts for Research

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation explores our third proposition that digital texts prompt shifting relationships between the material and the immaterial. Using observational data of children’s interactions in and around a literacy-rich virtual world in the classroom, I will illustrate how meanings are made across online and offline spaces.

Theoretical framework
The study of multimodality has drawn attention to the changing significance of different meaning-making systems in contemporary life (Kress, 2010), but whilst a strong thrust of this work has been to highlight the visual, there is a significant gap in accounting for how we believe in visual images as representations and consequently how we understand the relationship between the virtual and the material. Following the work of Hayles (1990), the virtual is taken to describe the interface between the world of data and the material world. I will argue that the process of mediation is significant to the shifting relationship between the material and virtual, and as technological sophistication draws us ever closer towards the ‘logic of transparent immediacy’ Bolter& Grusin (2000), this relationship becomes increasingly more complex. The very idea of a virtual world in a real classroom is an instantiation of this kind of complexity.
In their engagement with virtual worlds in the classroom, children move seamlessly between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. Often the logic of transparency is taken for granted, but at the same time so is the social space of the classroom. Children appear to make meanings through the inter-connecting pathways between the two spaces. Drawing on Deleuze’s (1993) idea of the baroque, I uncover the inherent complexity of situating children’s interactions with digital texts in classroom contexts.

Methods
The presentation uses data gathered in the South Yorkshire area of the UK through a 2-year study of classroom uses of a virtual world designed to develop literacy. Using classroom observations and in-world interviews with children, I focus on the how meanings are made by 9 and 10 year-olds in their use of online and offline texts.


Findings
By looking closely at how children approach virtual world gameplay, the study uncovers the complexity of the relationship between the material and immaterial. This in turn invites a more nuanced interpretation of the online/offline dichotomy – one that acknowledges fluidity and instability.

Scholarly Significance
This presentation problematises the use of the binaries online/offline; real/virtual; and material/immaterial. Rather than moving in the direction of coherence and convergence it argues for a view of new literacies that draws on the notion of baroque complexity and as a result offers a more nuanced understanding of how digital texts enter the communication economy of contemporary classrooms.



References
Bolter, J.D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. London: MIT Press.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Athlone Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1990). How we became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press.
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. London:Routledge.

Author

• Guy Merchant, Sheffield Hallam University