The Uses of Digital Literacy

John Hartley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351302067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

At the heart of this book lies a reappraisal of humanities research and its use in understanding the conditions of a consumer-led society. This is an open, investigative, critical, scientific task as well as an opportunity to engage with creative enterprise and culture. Now that every user is a publisher, consumption needs to be rethought as action not behavior, and media consumption as a mode of literacy.

Online social networks and participatory media are often still ignored by professionals, denounced in the press and banned in schools. But the potential of digital literacy should not be underestimated. Fifty years after Richard Hoggart's pioneering The Uses of Literacy reshaped the educational response to popular culture, John Hartley extends Hoggart's argument into digital media. Media evolution has made possible the realism of the modern age journalism, the novel and science not to mention mass entertainment on a global scale.

Hartley reassesses the historical and global context, commercial and cultural dynamics and the potential of popular productivity through analysis of the use of digital media in various domains, including creative industries, digital storytelling, YouTube, journalism, and mediated fashion. Encouraging mass participation in the evolutionary growth of knowledge, The Uses of Digital Literacy shows how today's teenage fad may become tomorrow's scientific method. Hartley claims the time has come for education to catch up with entertainment and for the professionals to learn from popular culture. This book will stimulate the imagination and stir further research.

‘The time to work for a commonweaith of civilizations is now.’

Giovanni Arrighi, Iftikhar Ahmad & Min-wen Shih (1996)

1

Repurposing Literacy

‘There Are Other Ways of Being in the Truth’

Dr Who?

Cultural and media studies in the Anglo-Australian tradition was founded more than fifty years ago by Richard Hoggart, whose book The Uses of Literacy (1957) set the agenda for educational and disciplinary reform in schools and universi ties, and whose trenchant views on what he saw as the abuse of literacy (Owen 2005), especially in entertainment media, found widespread public support. Hoggart focused on print media - the press, magazines, advertising and pulp fiction. Since then broadcast television has come and, although not gone, has begun to yield ground to successor media in the shape of online and mobile services. It is time for a reappraisal. What are the ‘uses of literacy’ in the era of multimedia?

Hoggart’s importance lies not so much in the examples he chose, and certainly not in his judgements of individual items, but in his attempt to connect the inner life of the individual imagination with the growth of mediated meanings in democ ratising and commercial societies. His interest in literacy was in what ordinary people did with it as part of everyday culture, rather than as an instrumental skill for business, civic or reli gious purposes. Hoggart valued the bottom-up ‘decent’ values of working-class community over the ‘candy-floss’ world of commercial entertainment, but in the end he knew that the problem was not going to be solved by preferring one over the other. He spent a long career arguing for ‘critical’ literacy as a form of popular engagement with popular media. In this endeavour he did not presume that the tastes of intellectuals are best for everyone else. As he put it in an apt turn of phrase: ‘there are other ways of being in the truth’ (Hoggart 1957: 261).

Hoggart’s own most famous public intervention into the popular ‘uses of literacy’ was to defend a commercial publisher from charges of obscenity. As a literary critic he was called as an ‘expert witness’; his judgement that D.H. Lawrence’s novel was not obscene but in fact ‘puritanical’ - because the characters in it were indeed pursuing their own way of being in the truth - helped to win the case (Paul Hoggart 2006). Naturally that led to extra readers for both Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence 1960) and The Uses of Literacy, and to extra income for Penguin, which published both books. Indirectly it led also to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cul tural Studies, in the form of a cheque given to Hoggart by Sir Allen Lane, owner of Penguin Books, that enabled him to set it up (Hartley 2003: 20-7). The trial was later made into a TV drama, The Chatterley Affair (produced by BBC Wales in 2006), where the role of Richard Hoggart was played by David Tennant, better known as the tenth Dr Who.

David Tennant as star witness Richard Hoggart in The Chatterley Affair

According to Hoggart’s elder son, Simon, the Guardian political columnist, Tennant got it just about right, albeit with one telling error:

Dad is played by the wonderful David Tennant (Blackpool, Casanova) who has carefully prepared his appearance by watching old interviews, even studying newspaper pictures of the time and having a picture of Dad on his mobile phone. He’s extremely con vincing - the suit, the hair, the Yorkshire accent, and trickiest of all, the speech rhythms. The only thing wrong is his sideburns. To do this film he had to take 24 hours off from making Doctor Who in Cardiff and, as he explained, the sideburns wouldn’t grow back in a day.

There, I thought, was a kind of fame - to have researchers and costume directors pore over every detail of your appearance, then be seen in the witness box wearing Doctor Who’s face furniture (Simon Hoggart 2006).

Reviewing the show, the TV critic for The Times - Hoggart’s younger son, Paul - concurred:

‘Was that OK?’ asked David Tennant slightly nervously after he had done his turn as my father in court. It was great,’ I said. ‘You did really well.’ And I meant it - about both of them (Paul Hoggart 2006).

Paul Hoggart commented: ‘Perhaps the strangest effect of [Andrew] Davies’s re-creation is that, despite everything, so many of the issues raised by the trial remain alive and unre solved today.’ It is some of those issues that this book attempts to work through and eventually beyond.

Making Discriminations

Richard Hoggart understood that in commercial democracies people can choose what media entertainments they like. Therefore, anyone motivated by a desire to promote ‘critical’ literacy and intellectual emancipation for all had better come to terms with what they do like, taking seriously the means people use to express themselves as well as the media they like and trust to tell them things, whether through pleasurable entertainment or painful home truths. This insight flew in the face of established intellectual authority. Since John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde (in Art) and then through A.C. Bradley, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis (in Literature), and in a weird parody of industrial or scientific expertise, critics before Hoggart had felt entitled to claim exclusive expertise in the matter of judgement, evaluation and taste-formation, a claim that entailed a refusal of the same to lay populations and especially to people of ‘lower’ class (Carey 1992). The very purpose of the critic was to name the difference between the ‘sublime’ (art) and the ‘cor blimey’ (popular sensation) and to tutor the ignorant public in matters of ‘discrimination’, which was treated as the humanities equivalent of scientific specialised methodology.

Popularised among the educated classes by F.R. and Q.D. Leavis and their journal Scrutiny, that attitude persisted as a commonsense policy setting at least until Thatcherism. Per haps the last time British literary critics were valued by people other than themselves was in the Annan Report on the Future of Broadcasting (1977); it was this report that eventually led to the establishment of Channel Four in 1982. The Annan Report offered literary critics as the representatives of critical citizenship, the antidote to medical experts and social investi gators, especially in TV shows about sex:

Their opinions need to be scrutinized by such people as literary critics or by shrewd men and women of the world; people who are accustomed to making discriminations about questions of value and right and wrong and who, not being overawed by the experts, would be skilled enough to put them under disconcerting cross-examination, and be quick to puncture pseudo-science mas querading as incontrovertible proof.

Hoggart himself was just the sort of critical citizen imagined here, and he maintained his own preference for ‘hard-working, fair-minded intelligent laymen and women’ over experts or partisans (Hoggart 1997: 289). A problem here, however, was that literary critics were not in fact ‘laymen and women’, but experts in their own narrow specialism - that of ‘making discriminations’. The idea that such people could speak for the population at large when questions of ‘sexual behaviour’ arose in public discussion seemed risible even at the time (I was among those who mocked: see Goulden & Hartley 1982). It could also be seen as ‘discriminatory’ in a negative way, seem ing to line critics up with established values and with forms of discrimination based on evaluating differences not just among texts but also among people, for instance by gender, race and class.

Hoggart had known the game was up twenty years earlier. The taste of the population could not be corralled into a universalist consensus on the say-so of soi-disant and self-selected intellectuals. It had become evident that their judgements were bounded by their own familial, age-group, class, gender, race, national and colonial status. Values - cultural as well as political and moral - were formed within the context of cultural specificity among increasingly differentiated demo graphics. Hoggart understood that those formed by ‘other’ experiences - other ways of being in the truth - were not anti-intellectual but came to wisdom by other means. Thus it became important to investigate the opportunities and temp tations that non-intellectual citizens may encounter along that route, which led directly to the study of mediated enter tainment in popular culture: in short to The Uses of Literacy.

Hoggart had a lot invested in the proposition that popu lar culture was a positive source of values and judgements (in the first half of Uses), even as he found fault with much of the entertainment fare destined for popular consumption (in the second half of Uses). But this remained a minority position, even on the Left, which continued to hold to a modernist and/or Marxist view that saw popular culture in opposition to intellectual culture, not to be trusted because it was prey to manipulation by powerful forces, from commerce to fascism, although oddly enough few literary intellectuals worried about popular culture being manipulated by communism - an exception being Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, where the youthful thugs’ argot (called Nadsat) was infiltrated by Russian words (Nadsat being the Russian for the suffix -teen).

Suspicion of the popular remains an important strand of thought among intellectuals. Literary theorist John Frow, for instance, wrote in Cultural Studies and Cultural Value:

There are clear limits to the extent to which it is possible for intel lectuals to associate themselves with anti-intellectualism; and there are limits to how far they can or should suspend their critique of, for example, racism, sexism, and militarism (1995: 158).

Commenting on this passage, the critic Alan Sinfield observed that Frow intended to:

reassess the wish, perhaps sentimental, of the middle-class intellectual to engage with popular culture: in practice, she or he will encounter there attitudes that are hard to take. Of course, one would not want to slide into an assumption that popular culture is fascist whereas high culture is enlightened (1997: xxv).

In Sinfield’s formulation, intellectuals are by definition middle-class. Equally, popular culture is cast as non-middle-class, taking the ‘popular’ in popular culture to mean demotic (low) rather than democratic (wide), as if intellectuals are external to and therefore exempt from it. This manoeu vre is required in order to produce an opposition between intellectual and popular culture, so as to cast the latter as a ‘site of struggle’ wherein progressive forces might contest those apparently fascistic tendencies among the ‘masses’.

This is indeed the Althusserian program for cultural studies that was elaborated by Hoggart’s successor Stuart Hall (1981: 239). But it is not Hoggart’s program, despite his own leftist progressivism, because he did not presuppose that the decision about what was progressive or fascist came from the judgement of the external critic. Instead, he saw that it might belong to those ‘other ways of being in the truth’. In other words, at the root of Hoggart’s project is the belief that popu lar culture can be self-correcting, whether in taste-formation, political progressivism or the emancipation of the imagination. At the root of the position espoused by Hall, Sinfield, Frow and others is the belief that popular culture can only be corrected from without, by intellectuals. This contrasts with Hoggart’s practice (he did not seek a theory), which sought by critical and educational engagement, both formal and infor mal, to make popular culture a self-correcting system through practical trial and error.

The only alternative to their own authority that critical and progressive-pessimist intellectuals could see was catastrophe: for instance a descent into an ‘anything-goes’ celebration of ‘populism’. They thought their critical expertise and author ity was a bulwark against fascism, which they identified with populism (an extensio ad absurdum enthusiastically revived by McGuigan 1992). Thus, Sinfield linked the ‘collapse in authority and consensus’ with a move to:

celebrate the equality-of-access, level-playing-field, notion of cultural opportunity that is often imagined in postmodern theory - as if roaming at will through the Internet and shopping without leav ing our IKEA futons will comprise all the freedom that we could reasonably want (Sinfield 1997: xxvii).

Unfortunately, such a tone comes across not as ironic scep ticism but as critical self-loathing, turning (unexplained, as if self-evident) hatred of consumerism against the intellectuals themselves, and reducing egalitarianism to self-indulgence. In its pessimism about the uses of digital literacy in a com mercial democracy, reducing it to shopping on the internet, it deflects attention away from what ‘cultural opportunity’, never mind freedom, might look like, preferring the easier option of a ‘critical’ refusal to engage, based on little more than taste-contempt for affordable DIY furniture. It is a fur ther iteration of the familiar cry of ‘more means worse’ that has greeted every extension of education, employment and consumer choice, not to mention the franchise, throughout the modern era (Carey 1992; Hartley 2003).

For Sinfield, following a standard line of Marxist cultural materialism, the way out of this impasse - loss of ‘authority’ on the one hand and lots of ‘shopping’ on the other - is ‘struggle’ or socialist agitation. Thus ‘struggle’ was set up as the high-prestige opposing pole to ‘populism’. In this context, Sinfield asked a pertinent question about what postwar British left activism was for.

What did we really intend - when we cried ‘America out’, for instance, in Grosvenor Square in 1968? We pushed and shoved at the line of police, with the apparent goal of breaking through and reaching the US Embassy. But what were we going to do when we got there? (Sinfield 1997: xxxii).

This is a good question, one that still applies to street dem onstrations, for instance those against globalisation or climate change. Sinfield does not entertain the possibility that the ‘intention’ was not to achieve an immediate instrumental goal but to achieve self-realisation through theatrical participation in a live social network, participating in a collective drama ritual. This, by the way, is certainly how I experienced the radicalising euphoria of London in 1968.1 didn’t know Alan Sinfield was in another part of that crowd in Grosvenor Square, but I did know Alan Sinfield - he had been Head Boy of the Royal Wolverhampton Orphan Asylum some years earlier, and I had been his ‘fag’ (Hartley 1999: 200-3).¹ Doubtless we experienced that day, not to mention that school, in very different ways, but I can answer his question about Grosvenor Square because I was there too, albeit among the 40,000 ‘milling around’ mob, rather than the two- to three-hundred-strong ‘get-into-the-Embassy’ group (Halloran et al. 1970: 217-18). Although the march opposed British involvement in Vietnam, the event was not only about America. One of those arrested on the day commented: ‘I thought it would be a bit of fun … I don’t know anything about politics or Vietnam but I hate coppers.’ Another said: ‘I think we ought to have more freedom and less control. You can’t insult police officers enough’ (quoted in Halloran et al. 1970: 79-80). According to a New Society survey, two-thirds of those present claimed they were protesting against ‘capitalism in general’ or against the ‘general structure of British society’; or even in favour of ‘Home Rule for Wales’ (Halloran et al. 1970: 67; 225). In other words, the demonstration was about fellow-feeling among disparate ‘we’ groups and opposition to a ‘they’ system. Against the ‘status quo’ and ‘the establishment’, it was collectively in favour of change - almost any change.

The demonstration was about how a self might get into a position where individual choices may be determined by the choices of others, by choosing to congregate physically with those others whose choices were valued. It would not neces sarily feel like it in the push and shove of the police line, but this rather odd way of putting the matter of ‘intention’ - of self-actualisation determined by others, and of pleasurable association in the context of serious events - is the foundation of a ‘social network market’ (Potts et al. 2008), about which more will need to be said later (in Chapter 2). Suffice it to say here that a ‘third way’ between authority and shopping was and remains available within commercial democracies. Self-realisation and intellectual critique are by no means incompatible with popular culture, as the protest songs of the 1960s attested, and the growth of new social movements in that period was fully ‘marketised’, not least through popular music, countercultural publishing and other creative indus tries. In short, and as always, the presence of ‘struggle’ (on the police line) does not imply the absence of ‘market’ (in the newsagent’s shop), nor does the presence of commercial entertainment imply the absence of ‘struggle’ - especially a struggle for emancipation into intellectual freedom and for connectivity with like-minded others.

What Is Digital Literacy For?

Fast-forwarding to the contemporary global environment, thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Repurposing Literacy ‘There Are Other Ways of Being in the Truth’
• 2. From the Consciousness Industry to the Creative Industries Consumer-created Content, Social Network Markets and the Growth of Knowledge
• 3. Bardic Television From the ‘Bardic Function’ to the ‘Eisteddfod Function’
• 4. Uses of YouTube Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge
• 5. Digital Storytelling Problems of Expertise and Scalability in Self-Made Media
• 6. A Writing Public Journalism as a Human Right
• 7. Fashion as Consumer Entrepreneurship Emergent Risk Culture, Social Network Markets and the Launch of Vogue in China
• 8. ‘The Future Is an Open Future’ Towards the ‘Chinese Century’ and Cultural Science
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index