I'm reading through the article "Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice" from the Journal of Literacy Research and have a few thoughts.

First of all, this was just the article I was looking for and didn't even know it. The authors set out to bring the global back into the very local practices studied in new literacies research. Let me step back and explain.

I had not been fully aware of this, but apparently I've been taught two contradicting takes on literacy without even realizing it. One is epitomized in the work of Walter Ong, I guess, and others who have suggested that the development of written literacy causes a revolution (a "Great Divide") in a society's ability to think, to develop abstractions, to recognize their emotions as changeable, to remember, etc. The other take is the new literacies approach, which questions the Eurocentricity of this approach. It studies literacy practices on local levels, finding that different communities use it differently and that there's much more of a gray continuum between oral and written verbal practices.

So the authors start out by saying that new literacies folks have gone too far towards eliminating any possibility of the global from their work, and their intent is to reconcile the two takes. And this is interesting to me, because it basically parallels the problem I am trying to face down in my current paper on Dance Dance Revolution. I am trying to reconcile the ideas of folks like Sut Jhally and Robert McChesney, which assumes that audiences are helpless in the face of media hegemony, with the ideas of Henry Jenkins, who finds that audiences repurpose media texts for their own uses. I think both the media monopoly and the Great Divide theorists are to some extent (though not purely) technologically determinist -- the medium being the message, whether that is print text or network television. So anyway, this article looks like it will be a pretty useful tool for knitting the two together.

There are a couple of points in it which stand out so far. The authors draw on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, in which technologies and other objects are seen as more or less on equal footing with people in communicating meaning, making arguments, and so forth. The authors use for an example an event in which someone enters a bank to apply for a loan. The authors say that "interest rates, the disclosure language, the reporting mechanisms, the counting machines all will transform this local literacy event into somebody else's meaning and send it into somebody else's setting where the meanings of the original context will not matter." (emph mine)

My initial thought was: what they meant to say was these objects have a standard meaning, which brings in connotations of the industrial period in which individual differences in product or process were smoothed out (standardized) for the sake of efficiency. Would this mean, then, that objects could not be considered actors in a network in another sociohistorical moment? Is actor-network theory an artifact of our era?

But the fact of the matter is even non-standardized objects bring meaning with them -- handmade tools, vessels, etc -- about how they are to be used. But it's pretty clear that standardized goods can carry their meaning more powerfully, more uniformly to more people. A passport, for example, has enroled (not sure I'm using that Latouerm correctly) the willingness of governments around the world to accept its claim to vouch for someone's identity; a letter of recommendation from the president, if handwritten on plain paper, would not have the same cachet and would face time-eating scrutiny in customs.

Perhaps standardized goods also carry with them the additional meaning "I am standardized" -- a claim which may mean different things to different people (depending, of course, on other networks or Discourses they participate in). When we pass by a Starbucks franchisee, for example, my student Fabiola sees a certain guaranteed quality of Frappucino, to which she aspires, whereas I see guaranteed bland inoffensiveness of environment, at which I feel comfortable turning up my nose.

Moving onward... The authors begin to define what they mean by "global" and "local" practices, and put forth a few promising categories of each. However, I think it's problematic trying to determine where local practices end and global ones begin. If I am watching someone watch Star Trek, how do I know when she is engaging in the global practice of watching TV as a generic viewer (the authors call the Internet and other communication systems "globalizing instruments par excellence," and I don't think they'd quibble with labelling network TV viewing as a global practice), when she is engaging in the probably-less-global practice of engaging with this fictional world as a Trekker (fictional worlds and abstract categories also cited as being globalizing), and when she is engaging as a fan participating in a local network of friends? I suppose the surround matters -- if her friends are with her and they're chatting about their take on the show, I guess that's mostly local -- but how do we know she hasn't suddenly stopped thinking about the show in terms of the semantic network of Star Trek, and begun to associate it with other shows?

We're clearly dealing with shades of local and global, here; it's not a clean dichotomy. And sadly, it leaves me without an answer to one of my major questions of Henry Jenkins's work, which is: if not everybody interacts with pop culture texts the way hard core fans do, revising them to their own tastes in fanfic and conventions and filk music, how is everyone else interacting with these pop culture texts? Mightn't they still be sheepishly sucking up the messages Sut Jhally thinks they are? Certainly advertisers are still confident enough to banking that they do. (At least some of them. Frankly, they're probably savvier about local audiences than these theorists are.)

The question then is roughly the one Jess and I would like to answer: How do people become creative manipulators of texts, rather than passive consumers of them?