Does Writing Online Change the Nature of the Writing Act?

van Manen, Max, and Catherine Adams. “The Phenomenology of Space in Writing Online.” Educational
Philosophy & Theory 41.1 (2009): 10-21. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 15 Nov. 2010.

I reviewed this article because it explores the realm of online writing in a philosophical sense which provides insights as to how teachers can think about their pedagogy in using digital technologies in the English classroom. Max van Manen and Catherine Adams explore the question of whether the space in which writers write online affect them differently than older technologies such as ink pens and typewriters(10). They conclude that “online computer technologies intensify the phenomenology of writing—they speed up, accelerate, compel, draw us into the virtual vortex of the experience of writing” and raise the “potential loss of reflectivity,” the “easy publicness of publishing to the Web,” and the “complexity of human relation through text”(21).

At first glance, the reader of this blog is asking how this relates to the use of digital writing technologies in the secondary English classroom. I believe that three points that van Manen and Adams discuss raise interesting considerations for the writing classroom, but only two will be discussed.

Albeit, their discussion of the writing act itself is romanticized for and more relevant to an audience of serious writers/composers of text. High school students, however, are located toward the opposite extreme of writing whereby they are writing in school to accomplish a task. But now, they are writing outside of class more using mobile technologies.

1)The authors discuss how much more intimate writing pen to paper is and how cross-outs and editing are still visible when composing text on paper, but reflection lacks when composing text online (13). The cross-outs are forever gone and cannot be recalled, which renders the text, as van Manen explains, “perfect already (though we may know it needs more editing),” that typing and keyboarding “cast text in the presentable type-face of public font,” and that the words are “strikingly clean, professional and ‘published’”(13). When students see their writing on the screen, they see it as published already; therefore, it needs no revision. van Manen and Adams offer that in the online writing space “words seem to invite rather than resist revision,” but simultaneously, and “ambiguously, the words already appear perfect and finished, near ready for publication” (13). With this insight, English teachers can begin a discussion with herself as instructor and with students about what is the extent that revision is needed in online writing. This discussion will lend itself to considering purpose and audience.

2)Another point the writers make is that composing online has the immediacy of conversation. As soon as the student composes the text online, it is out there in cyberspace. The experience of “editing, writing, editing follows much closer to our train of thought”(18). Because students are more expressive in their teen years and because they express impulsively without reflecting or thinking about what they say, the same issues become problematic with writing online. Perhaps English teachers can use this as an opportunity to foster reflection and thoughtful consideration when publishing texts online—especially in social networking sites where students often post without considering the consequences of what they post in cyberspace.

I imagine English teachers discussing “socratically” the insights the authors offer here about the phenomenology of space in writing online, and I see the possibilities of what that insight can open pedagogically in the digital English classroom.

T. Street 11/2010