The Writing Classroom: Surreptitious Students in the Digital Underlife

Mueller, Derek.  “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom.”  Computers and               

      Composition 2009: 240-250.  ScienceDirect.  Web.  25 Sept.  2010.

Imagine standing in line for hours to purchase concert tickets to see Elton John.  You wait a long time, you pay a high price.  You get them.  You are there on the lawn listening oh so attentively to Elton John.  Suddenly, you become cognizant of the chattering around you…while EJ is singing!

If EJ can’t get 100 percent of the attention of all concert patrons, how can a professor or teacher expect to get the same in a classroom of 30 “fidgeting” with electronic devices?

These folks are “backchanneling,” or what Derek N. Mueller redefines as participating in the “digital underlife,” during an event that requires attention on a focal speaker.  We see it all the time at faculty and conference room meetings. 

Mueller cites many scholars and professors opposing the possession of and/or use of Internet-connected computers in the classroom.  They claim students are too distracted to absorb what the instructors are instructing as such was the case in Illinois.  Administrators at the University of Chicago Law School demanded that classrooms block Internet access to prevent “technological distractions” (241). 

Mueller takes a more reasoned stance.  He first outlines the research on the economics of attention citing Robert Brooke’s ethnographic study of students’ “subsidiary activities” in a first-year writing class (243).  Brooke relies on anthropologist Erving Goffman’s contention that “underlife behaviors are a normal part of institutional  life.” Also, Brooke defines underlife as “the activities individuals engage in to show that their identities are different from or more complex than the identities assigned them by organizational roles” (243).  Students are simply asserting their identities in a virtual space that they control within a real space that they have no control.

Since Mueller recognizes and accepts that this “digital underlife” is a reality in the writing classroom, or any classroom, he posits that teachers  see it as a “productive dimension,” rather than what Brooke calls “contained” and/or “disruptive” dimensions (246).  Students are making connections between what’s being transmitted in the classroom with what’s transpiring in their lives—they’re making connections, mediating meaning, and asking questions.  Isn’t that the aim of learning?  Mueller, among other ideas, suggests that writing teachers create time with students to discuss how both they and the instructors use mobile technologies, thereby making “the array of attentional demands more tangible” (248).

This is an age-old problem that has plagued classroom teachers throughout history; the only difference is the device by which students, and adults, “distract” themselves.  However, I cannot devise a way to use body language or facial cues transmitting across the room while I am teaching into a productive dimension, but I do see what Mueller proposes with digital technological distractions—make them a part of the learning in the classroom.  Using Facebook, Twitter, and blogging are intriguing for the writing classroom, and we can incorporate a rhetorical foundation for their use.  If national technology conferences allow their attendees, even encourage them, to use these digital devices to interchange with each other about topics covered in these conferences, couldn’t we (teachers) attempt to make it work in our classrooms? c                                                                     

                                                                                                                               T. Street 11/2010