Concept: 3rd person narration over screencast video of PowerPoint with relevant images and then live scrolling through Carr’s online article.

Script: (Note: Narration in video may not 100% match written script)

This story of a digital literacy epiphany starts in an unlikely place: an alphabetic text. It all started when our heroine, Kim Fahle, took a course on Modernist Periodicals. For this course, she was assigned to read George Bornstein’s Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. In this book Bornstein argues for modernist scholars to pay attention to the materiality and situatedness of modernists texts in their original publications and how these texts change when placed in new contexts. Bornstein uses Benjamin’s concept of “aura”

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space” (cited in Bornstein, 2001, pg. 6)

And McGann’s notion of bibliographic code:

“Bibliographic code can include features of page layout, book design, ink and paper, and type face as well as broader issues which D.F. McKenzie might call ‘the sociology of texts,’ like publisher, print run, price, or audience” (p. 7).

Essentially, Bornstein is arguing that material considerations including font, page layout, what a text was published alongside--other texts, images, ads--shape the meaning produced by the text, and when we read these texts in decontextualized contexts, like in anthologies, we lose some of the meaning generated from this context. When our heroine read this, she was like OMG! Yes! This makes so much sense! And this led to a fun project on the Modernist Magazine BLAST and its use of materiality to promote active and “masculine” reading practices. But the full breadth of the lessons of this moment would come into sharper focus at a later moment in our heroine’s literacy journey.

Fast forward a few years. The setting: a small home office. There is a desk and comfy office chair, papers strewn around an open laptop. A cat winding around our heroine’s leg. Basically, the scene is as you would expect for a teacher preparing a lesson. But this stereotypical setting is about to be home to a transformational moment for our heroine. Though she had been exposed to notions of materiality and situatedness of texts, these ideas had grown dim as her brain was consumed with grading, grading, and more grading. Our heroine, who now found herself as an adjunct at a community college, was preparing to reread a text she had read before. The text: Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” She had read this text a few months earlier reproduced in a reader for college writing courses that was being considered by her institution for use in composition classes. So when planning her syllabus for the coming semester, she had thought it would be a good essay to assign for a developmental reading course linked to a composition course. “This will be a challenging text to tackle towards the end of the semester,” she thought, “and we will be reading a text talking about reading in a class on reading--how Meta!” She was convinced this would be a good assignment. Also, luckily for our heroine, Carr’s text is available online, so she and her students would be able to easily access it.

So the time had come to reread Carr’s text to prepare for class. Our heroine was sitting in her comfy chair, occasionally petting her persistent cat, when she opened the link to Carr’s text. Let’s take a moment to journey into our heroine’s mind to witness her experience…

Kim’s monologue:

“Hmmm interesting image. I wonder how it relates?”

(scroll)

Highlight and read: “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

(Continue Scrolling)

“Marshal McLuhan--I don’t know who that is” (click on hyperlink, look at Wikipedia page) “Hmmm, ‘the meaning is the message,’ interesting.”

“Ok…” (Back to scrolling Carr’s article, get distracted by side ad for most popular stories)

(Ad lib about popular articles recommended)

(highlight pulled out quote)  

“Hmm. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of Brain Reading” (clicks on hyperlink and gets taken to Amazon page) “Cool, maybe I’ll add this to my wish list”

(Continue to scroll, sees as the bottom links to additional pages of the article). “Whoa 3 more pages. My students are going to hate me. Alright here we go, page 2...maybe I’ll grab a snack first”