Literate Lives in the Information Age

"This book documents a critical period in the history of literacy. It is rife with glimpses into the transformations of reading and writing at the millennium. From the family sitting around a telephone jack playing Star Trek on an Air Force simulation computer to the third grader with an e-mail account, the authors show us the sometimes wacky and sometimes sobering 'technology gateways' that mark conditions of access to literacy in these times."
—Deborah Brandt
Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"The 'literate lives' we read about here are not set wholly within familiar sites for literacy, such as schools of libraries, nor do they derive entirely from formal learning. Instead, they reflect the lived experience of unique individuals, who weave their own versions of literacy through the pains and joys of everyday life. Telling their life stories around literate practices, they show how they construct a literate life on the substrates of race, class, and gender, and develop it in terms of their role in economic, technological, and political history.

Each unique life history in this book is a fascinating story by itself with elements as diverse as working on a committee, listening to music, playing video games, going to a prom, or protesting a war. The attention to these concrete details makes the cases come alive and shows not only the particular construction of a literate life, but the way it emerges out of ordinary experience. This attention to the particulars is in the final analysis what reveals the interconnectedness of the larger social forces and the distinctive way that these forces play out within the situated realities of life."

—Bertram (Chip) Bruce
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois

"Selfe and Hawisher's Book provides an incredibly rich and detailed amount of information about the development and acquisition of literacy and digital literacies by individuals and the contexts that assisted or constrained their achievements...Their book challenges some of the long-held beliefs about the intersection between the acquisition of digital literacies and race, class, ethnicity, and gender and demonstrates a far more complex relationship that others have presented." --Katina Zammit, School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Australia, Journal of Literacy Research