Surfing the Web

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After a dearth of computer articles in 1994, the computer came back strong in 1995, spurred on in part by the rising popularity of graphical internet browsers such as Netscape Navigator and NCSA Mosaic. While Mosaic came online in 1993 and Netscape followed in 1994, 1995 nevertheless was a big year in internet history because this was the moment when web browsing started to move from a subcultural geek activity to a broader cultural sensation (Web browser history). By then end of 1995, even the behemoth Microsoft had entered the graphical web game with their introduction of Internet Explorer, which would go on to dominate the browser market for quite a few years. Although some teachers in 1995 were still focused on the older networked technologies of email and newsgroups (Davis 1995; Owen 1995), other teachers were turning their attention to the emerging World Wide Web (Graves 1995; McGlinn 1995; Noden 1995).

In 1995, Harry Noden moved from using mostly text-based email applications and bulletin boards with his classes to having students surf the web with Mosaic and Netscape. And, he described this shift as nothing short of a revolution:

Picture an imaginary world where text, audio, and video blend into one information system at your fingertips. Imagine a world where students can watch leading world authorities lecture hundreds of miles away, participate in instant online follow-up discussions, where you can tour the world’s most precious art galleries on your computer screen, listen to music composed especially for cyberspace, and view the latest short clip of a space shuttle launch. The software programs Mosaic and Netscape do all of this and foreshadow much more. . . . The difference between experiencing the net using Mosaic or Netscape and experiencing it via ASCII text is like the difference between listening to music on a homemade crystal set and watching MTV on a 48-inch screen with full surround sound (25)

For readers in the current moment, it may be hard to understand just how exciting it was to be able visit a website coming from far away that was loaded with all kinds of cool graphics (kind of like this one!), but we think this quote from Noden can help us conceptualize just how revolutionary the emerging technology of the graphical web appeared to many teachers in the 1990s. In the Noden quote, we can also see how the internet was imagined as a remediation of the television--sharing the television’s sense of immediacy and global connection while adding a more interactive component. For example, Noden marveled that students could potentially not just watch speeches from far away, but they could also interact with leading experts in real time using chat clients and discussion boards. We see here too that the computer was finally catching up to the television in its robust multimodality--combining image, sound, and text in abundant, exuberant ways. (Speaking of multimodality, we hope you like the surf soundtrack on this page . . . so much cooler than boring old text, right?).

In addition to being excited about the robust multimodal capabilities of the World Wide Web, English teachers in the mid-nineties were super jazzed about how the web could enable them to globalize their classrooms. Here’s just a sampling of some of the enthusiastic (and at times problematic) ways that English teachers imagined the web as powerful tool for breaking down the borders of both the classroom and the nation:

• “Using a computer and a modem, you can tear down classroom walls and fly through cyberspace. . . . It’s like watching the same TV show as everyone else in the world, except it’s better than TV because it’s interactive: you get to ‘talk back.’ Cyberspace is the new global village” (Graves 1995, 41–42).
• “Scary though it may be at first, the vast, colorful, ever-changing World Wide Web--which can transport you from your workroom to the farthest reaches of our planet--promises limitless benefits for teachers, if we can learn to harness it” (Morrison 1996, 89 ).
• “Suddenly, I was a galactic explorer, a time traveler, instantaneously connecting with fascinating cultures and exotic lifestyles thousands of miles away. . . . In school, lunch became a thing of the past. My students and I could be found at the computer traveling in cyberspace, checking our world map as a reference as we met a fascinating array of people and cultures” (Noden 1995, 21).

Although it can be inspiring to see how the rise of the web encouraged teachers to attempt to globalize their classrooms, these rhetorics of web surfing as a process of exploring “fascinating” and “exotic” cultures of the “global village” often relied on racist and colonialist tropes of tourism that imagined the world beyond the United States as an unexplored landscape that existed primarily to be easily and simply consumed by white, class-privileged internet users (Nakamura 2002). As Nakamura argued about this era, the early World Wide Web was often promoted as a benevolent force that could erase racial and national boundaries, but ultimately colonialist rhetorics of net browsing worked to further exacerbate racial and class inequalities. Furthermore, these rhetorics of cyberspace as a place of infinite possibility and connection worked to mask the reality that the number of internet users was ultimately quite small both in the United States and globally.

Certainly, there is much to value in how teachers looked to the World Wide Web as a way to rethink English curricula through a global lens, but a look back at how quickly these rhetorics of globalized literacy education reified colonialist tropes can remind us to be vigilant to avoid the common tendency to imagine new technologies as simple and easy fixes to persistent inequalities. Indeed, we should be mindful that there is a long history of educational media producers employing colonialist tropes of exploration to promote the virtual travel capabilities not only of the World Wide Web but also of older pedagogical media, including stereoscopes, instructional films, and educational radio (Good 2020). (Accordingly, we hope it’s become clear at this point that our repeated invocations of “surfing” on the design of this page are intended as a parodic attempt at LULZ and not as a sincere endorsement of the view of the internet as an “exotic,” touristic space.)

In addition to promoting the web as a force that could break down borders, many teachers in this period also tended to argue that bringing web surfing into English classrooms was essential for engaging young people who were ostensibly already living much of their lives online. While articles in the mid-nineties tended to position the web as a new technology for both students and teachers, this rhetoric shifted in the latter 1990s to emphasize how English teachers needed to catch up with their already web-savvy students. Relying on commonplace arguments about youth’s new media literacies that have recurred throughout our corpus time and again, teachers argued that:

• “The use of the computer in schools is as commonplace for today’s students as the presence of the ballpoint pen was for many of their parents. Today’s youngsters are more computer literate than any of their predecessors ever dreamed of becoming” (Byrne 1998, 19).
• “The ability to find resources via the Web makes researching appealing, almost glitzy, to adolescents. Teens enjoy the electronic medium for research; having to surf the Web looking for sources is almost a forced pleasure. They are attracted by the graphics and multimedia extras; they find jumping from link to link in nano-seconds more enjoyable than paging through indexes of thick books” (Gardner, Benhem, and Newell 1999, 39).
• “With all of the hoopla about the Internet--which includes mandates from our President, from other government officials, from businesses, from parents, from school boards, and from our students--we English teachers need to respond. [. . .] Everyone agrees that the kids know more about computers than the teachers. So why not use this resource, students, to help you become computer literate” (Nellen 1998, 105).

As Nellen aptly put it, there was a whole lot of “hoopla” about the World Wide Web in the 1990s: for many in the time period, it seemed that online reading and writing was the future and teens were leading the way. Governmental and corporate literacy sponsors were also promoting web-based learning as a panacea for all the supposed problems of K-12 education. In view of all the hoopla surrounding the internet, it’s not surprising that some teachers got a bit carried away in the extravagant claims they made about youth internet use. While rates of computer and internet use were certainly growing in the 1990s, computers were most certainly not as plentiful as pens. In 1998, for example, the U.S. Census bureau reported that only twenty-six percent of households had internet access and only forty-two percent had a computer (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). Looking back at the extravagant claims some teachers made about how all the youth were living online, we can remember to be cautious of how hyperbolic rhetorics of technological change often work to mask access inequalities.

A Critical Turn:
Addressing Access Inequality and Digital Misinformation

Although some English teachers in the 1990s clearly did buy into the computer hype, it’s notable that that English Journal also featured some articles that were more critical of rhetorics of digital technology in this time period. In 1999, Charles Moran and Cynthia Selfe (two leading members of the “computers and writing” community) published an important article that turned a critical eye on much of the hoopla surrounding computers. In a cautionary warning that remains relevant today, Moran and Selfe reminded educators to be wary that many corporate and governmental “advocates for technology often have an agenda that has nothing to do with our students’ learning” (50)--that teachers should resist claims that a particular new technology will automatically enhance learning and instead carefully explore both the benefits and limitations of any new technology they might introduce. Challenging the common rhetoric that positioned all youth as computer savvy, Moran and Selfe importantly pointed out how this hyperbolic rhetoric ultimately worked to further marginalize students who did not have sufficient access to computer-based writing technologies. Calling attention to how rates of computer ownership were unequally distributed by race and class, Moran and Selfe noted that many teachers of writing faced a problematic situation in which they were

likely to receive in a given set of student essays a few pieces that are beautifully formatted and desktop-published, incorporating Web research and images. In the same set, we are also likely to receive a few pieces that are handwritten on ruled paper, with messy-looking erasures, layers of correction fluid, or simply crossed out errors. Of course, we are talking about appearance here, but we’re also talking about speed and ease of composition, revision, editing, and research. (49)

As word processed text was beginning to emerge as the preferred standard, students without access to computers and printers were certainly being put at a disadvantage. While one teacher responded to Moran and Selfe article with a letter to the editor that accused their work of being “anti-technology” (Nellen 1999), it’s important to note that Moran and Selfe were not suggesting that writing teachers should abandon computers altogether; rather they called for literacy educators to become much more activist in recognizing and working to redress inequalities in technological access:

In our voting for school board members, in committee meetings, in public hearings, at national conventions, in the public relations statements of our professional organizations, we have to argue -- every chance we get -- that poor students and students of color get more access to computers and to more sophisticated computers, that teachers in schools with high populations of such students be given more support. (53)

Here, we see Moran and Selfe making a powerful argument that all teachers of literacy needed to work collectively to call attention to and challenge digital inequalities--an argument that remains timely today. Although rates of internet access (via computers and mobile phones) have increased substantially since the 1990s, technological access inequalities remain a problem in our current moment. As just one example, there is a large difference between a student who accesses the internet solely on an aging cell phone through a public wifi hotspot, and a privileged student who can access high speed internet on a wide variety of new devices loaded with the latest software. Persistent inequalities in educational funding also ensure that some schools continue to have more substantial computing resources than others. Not to mention, institutional racism, sexism, and ableism in the tech industry and the broader culture ensures that many online spaces are welcoming to class privileged, able-bodied white men and hostile to other groups (Banks 2005; Gelms 2019; Gruwell 2017; Noble 2018; Yergeau et al. 2013). Although the specific forms access inequality takes have shifted in some ways since Moran and Selfe wrote in 1999, the need for teachers to engage in critical activism to address access inequalities remains timely as ever. We think it particularly important that Moran and Selfe chose to publish this call in English Journal in hopes of helping to support and inspire a mass movement of techno-activism among K-12 English teachers. Although Selfe and Moran published other important articles and books about access in this period addressed primarily towards an audience of college writing instructors (Moran 1999; Selfe 1999), we think it significant that they saw K-12 education as a crucial location for technological activism and thus wanted to make sure that their work reached as many K-12 educators as possible.

In addition to calling for teachers to engage in political activism about questions of access, Moran and Selfe also suggested teachers could work on a small scale to enhance access in their schools by “resisting the marketing hype” around expensive new technologies and instead working “locally, and constructively, with the low-end technology that is out there” (52). In making this call for valuing low-end technology, Moran and Selfe were very much echoing the low-tech approach advocated by Rod Scott (1995) who noted in EJ that “I always maintain a library of word processing and educational software that will run on 10- or 12-year-old computers. That way when others are giving away older computers, I can scoop them up and put them to good use” (62). Not only is valuing older low-tech computers a great way for teachers make digital learning work in a resource-limited environment, but saving computers from the landfill is also a great strategy for addressing the burgeoning environmental problem of e-waste (Apostel and Apostel 2009).

In this period, English teachers also increasingly came to recognize that students needed instruction in evaluating the veracity of all vast quantities of information they might find on the web (Gardner, Benhem, and Newell 1999; Elliott 2000). In conducting an action research project about students’ use of internet sources for writing, Catherine Elliott (2000) found that “students were using inaccurate information in many research projects (one student cited a Neo-Nazi site as a source in a paper about Hitler)” (88)--a clear sign that students needed more instruction in evaluating the credibility of web-based sources. At this current moment when resurgent alt-right, fascist movements, and racist politicians are increasingly disseminating dangerous misinformation via online media, Catherine Elliott’s call for more intensive information literacy instruction to counter neo-Nazi propaganda feels more pressing than ever.

Although the proliferation of misinformation online has led some teachers (both in the 1990s and today) to discourage students from using internet sources, a retreat back to the world of print is unlikely to make a meaningful intervention in students’ ability to navigate the complex information landscapes in which they find themselves. As Gardner, Benhamm, and Newell so cogently argued in 1999,

students now access the Net to find information on travel, recreation, health, the government, and so on. They will be using the Internet for life, and they need to be able to distinguish the genuine from the bogus on the sites they enter. Teaching students evaluation strategies is the critical element in research, for only with such strategies will our students be able to untangle the intricate Web we’ve woven. (44)

As the vast amount of information and disinformation on the web continues proliferating, this call for teachers to engage students in critically evaluating web (as well as print) sources remains crucial. In the pedagogical inspirations section of this chapter, we offer some of our tips for strategies teachers might use to engage students in thinking and acting critically about bias and misinformation in online media.