CCR691 – Final Project – Johnson-Eilola
Johnson-Eilola, J. “Living on the Surface: Learning in the Age of Global Communication Networks.” Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Snyder, Ilana. London: Routledge, 1998. 185-210. Print.
- In this piece, J.E. makes the argument that we are living in an age of the “surface” or of ahistorical existence. This makes the older folks (the essay is from 98) uncomfortable because the surface ignores the deep histories of existence; however, there’s no need to fear. Play – in all it’s wonderfullness – is the way that rhizomatically associating learning takes place now “on the screen.”
- This article explains the difference between instrumentalist (type, print, etc.) technologies and “substantive” (TV, the web) technologies. The surface technologies are actually substantive in ways that the instrumentalist technologies could never imagine – they form their users as much as the users form them (189).
- The chapter demonstrates the “postmodern” communication consumption of children by investigating 1) simultaneous, parallel reading and 2) free-form, ill-defined problem domains.
- Smart observations about free-form nature of games nowadays opening up narratives that linear, modernist board games could not.
- These new sorts of interfaces and games emphasize space over time. The space is to be explored and the temporal accumulation – so valued by modernity – is entirely tangential to the overall enterprise.
- J.E. posits that the database is the fundementally postmodern way to aggregate, store, sift, and contain information. This is in opposition to the linear-hierachical list (197).
- Ludic vs. resistance postmodernism is dicussed at the end of the article. The ludic is the complete free associaotion of signifiers – nothing means anything. Resistance asks us to look at the free-play of signifiers and attempt to demonstrate how the breaking down of traditional hierarchies can be reconstructed in more equitable and just ways.
- The “moving terrain” of postmodernism doesn’t completely negate truths. Working from Benhabib’s theororization of pomo, J.E. notes that it is important to consider HOW truths enter into discourses. That’s the real question . . . not whether something is a truth at all. This work must be extended to computer literacies. J.E. notes that we must teach this critical ability – the ability to recognize how structures/interfaces are legitimated in order to function on the surface. In other words, understand contextualization.
