Inventing Electracy

ANN STEWART

Electracy implies that the user can adapt their current knowledge of software and hardware to be used in learning new modes and new techniques in the electronic world. That knowledge is partly based on educational play. For instance, if I feel inspired to build my own website with no other knowledge than how to turn on a computer and open up Firefox and a search engine, I can still make great leaps in my building my utilizing my search bar. I would input, "How to build a website" into the search bar, press return, and get a slew of free and useful results. This availability, using some common computer skills and my knowledge of a specific language (in this case English) instigates the next step in my knowledge building. Once I learn and apply some concepts provided to me by my search I have already adapted my knowledge to suit various programs such as iWeb, GoDaddy, PageMaker, and other web building software and freeware. Though many of these programs have specific rules and applications, I can learn those fairly quickly either through play or through searching for those answers in the Internet. I can also add to the knowledge base by working through a problem with few available answers and submit my own remedy.
I can understand why Ulmer's chart puts Electracy in the entertainment category. There is a motive when we are introduced to the Internet to find our own place in that community, to entertain ourselves. However, I would argue that we do the same in a university or conversational setting. There are rules of discourse in all communities which we abide by, unknowingly or not, and regardless of those rules we can come to find our place and our community. Learning is social, I agree with Karen Burke Lefevre and to be social is to abide by or to attempt to break social customs and rules. Even in learning to build my website, I am abiding by rules established by a social set. There are even a few places I can choose to break those rules but in doing so I am offering a response to those rules, however, passive. To be literate in any sense is to be social on some level.

In response to Ulmer's use of the five memos of E-lit from Calvino: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and the assumed final memo of consistency: I am a bit frustrated that his use of them in explanation does not go far beyond the first memo.
The memos:
"Lightness = verbal texture, the language in which the piece is composed: lexicon, diction, syntax. Quickness = the “path of thought” of a work, which translates formally into linking in hypermedia, or the manner of unfolding of theme, plot, figure: circuitous? Direct? The rhythm of passage. Exactitude = the mood or atmosphere of the piece, focused on a scale from sharp to vague. Visibility = visualization in images, but more generally the appeal to all the senses using figures, description, exposition, as well as image or sound files. Multiplicity = the relationship between parts and wholes, on a scale between clean and cluttered."

"In class we work through the first memo together, implementing a Confucian principle: if I show you one corner (of the table), you should be able to find the other three. The quality analyzed is 'Lightness.'"

This holds true with my example of the Russian students looking at a game where text is based in Japanese. If the student can use the limited information of pictures and actions and controller movements provided to her in a world she is already somewhat familiar with (the gaming community and storytelling) she can assume what some of the text that she is not literate in is getting at. In the example of the table, the students could very well be wrong in their assumption of what the three remaining pieces will look like but it is more likely their assumptions will be proved right. The practice actually uses more than one memo from the list.

In Ulmer's undergraduate and graduate lessons, he emphasizes that images are most prominent in Electracy whereas text is not. As a writer and as someone who has literacy in the online world, I have to disagree. The convergence of images, flashes, and text reemphasize what each individual part is trying to communicate. Images can say a lot on their own, but so can words without those images. As far as my exposure, I see an evenness and agreement and not the binary that Ulmer is talking about.