photo credit: beret claire

Two recent experiences really illuminated for me the possibilities of computer-mediated communication.

As I was walking down the street the other day, my 10-year-old nephew texted me from his mom’s cell phone. Now, leaving aside for the moment the ramifications of using “text” as a verb ( I think I like it, but am not 100% sure yet…), I was delighted for two reasons. First was the element of surprise: Expecting some information my sister had promised to send me, I opened my phone to find a very sweet message (the first ever) from Max. More importantly in this context, the texts (there were ultimately three) revealed a slightly different Max than the one I thought I knew. Or, perhaps not a different Max exactly, but rather, more of him. The first message was brief, a sort of test message, but when I wrote back he sent a longer message asking what he and my sister should buy for a dinner I’d be having with them.

I gather my sister was playing Cyrano for the first two, but I the last message was pure Max. Despite (or, as I suspect, because of) the compression enforced by the 160 (??) character limit, Max managed to explain which Star Wars Lego sets he wanted for his birthday (and why) with the precision of a New Yorker critic. Most interestingly of all, getting my nephew to write anything, much less a critical evaluation, is ordinarily like pulling teeth, and here he was waxing eloquent in (albeit in abbreviated form) in 160 characters! When I got to the Toys-R-Us in Times Square (fertile ground for a million and one sociology/economic/gender studies dissertations-but I digress!) I was amazed by the keenness of his assessments and preferences.

Now, before you dismiss me as just another doting aunt (I confess), I’d like to return to my larger point, the possibilities for real-time communication technology (or whatever rubric best contains texting, tweeting, instant messaging, Skyping, etc…) to broaden students’ (and in fact everyone’s) writng, and perhaps, for that writing to broaden us. I think there’s something about powerful motivation to communicate (whether to score the best Star Wars Lego or avoid a social gaffe) coupled with constraints of time and space, that, paradoxically, free the writer of other kinds of constraints like correctness, “smartness”, and formal requirements.

My exchange with my nephew only underscored this notion; I’d experienced this odd ‘freedom’ Skyping with my husband a few weeks before. He was out of the country, and we’d agreed to talk to each other via Skype. For some reason, my headpiece couldn’t receive calls, and the two of us ended up using the messaging feature instead. I’m know I’m revealing my lack of tech-savvy here, but it was my first experience with real-time messaging minus the character limitations of cell-phone texting. Here too, I was delighted to hear a slightly “different” version of my husband’s voice, and was struck by the ways in which “Skyping” was both more and less like our in-person conversations than e-mail: The speed of transmission allowed us to joke around as we do in person (and the medium of text made us even more horribly punny than usual), while the time constraint (the idea of the other person waiting for an answer) and time difference (fewer opportunities to communicate) forced us to pack maximum content into minimum time and space. Rather than worry about typing, spelling and diction, we were wholly focused on conveying information and meaning. This freed me from a tendency to over-explain (apologies for this post!) and my husband (it seemed) from the opposite, a tendency to minimal descriptions of his experiences, insights,thoughts and interactions with others. In short, I felt “allowed” to be quieter and simpler, and in turn, had the privilege of “hearing” more of my husband’s very sharp, funny, and very personal take on his experiences.

In short, it seems to me that communication software like Skype, texting, and Twitter offers far more than a means to transmit information. Rather, in their strict confines, we might find freedom.

I’m working with some project reports, which are group-written and must conform to fairly strict guidelines. Not surprisingly, the native speakers tend to do most of the writing so that the entire group isn’t penalized for grammar and syntax issues. While understandable, this situation creates conditions that are detrimental to the whole group: First , it forces the second-language speakers to do a lot of the legwork in order to “pull their weight” while potentially overshadowing their contribution, and second, it pretty much destroys any kind of group ownership of the project. When meeting with the groups, I found myself addressing the writer of each section (which I could sort of guess by noticing who perked up as I reached it), rather than the group as a whole, which generally demurred with comments like “Oh, I don’t know about that part-I didn’t write it”, or “you’ll have to ask _____-she wrote the whole thing.” Over time it dawned on me that most of the non-writers weren’t even reading their own group’s report! When I suggested some different divisions of labor (and also that it might not be the best idea to put your name on something you haven’t read) _everyone_ agreed that the chance of being graded badly on grammar/syntax errors was too great to risk, and that it really didn’t matter whether they read the report or not, at least in terms of their grade (i.e. the way that “matters”!) I admit that I didn’t have the guts to ask about the division of labor during the design process, but it occurs to me now that I might find a way to speak to the groups _generally_ about their experience working in groups. I wanted to encourage the non-native speakers to participate more in the writing process (increasing their control over their contribution ), but felt it would be hypocritical, given the very real repercussions their “mistakes” might have on their groups’ grade. I don’t have immediate solutions for this problem, of course, but I thought I’d get it on the table. Thoughts?