Gloss on Electronic Media, Identity Politics, and the Rhetoric of Obsolescence

Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society.

Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society. As a professor of literature, I’m concerned about the not insubstantial number of incurious college students who resist using library databases to conduct research and who must be coerced, through specific assignments that require them to check out and read books, journals, and magazines, into exploring what’s available in the stacks at the university library.