Foreword: Writing is a really problematic unit of analysis
Asif Agha (2007) has defined language use as “events of semiosis in which language occurs” (p. 6), and I recently paraphrased that definition to say that “literate activity must be understood as events of semiosis in which writing is implicated” (Prior, 2015b, p. 197) —“implicated” not only because material texts and transcriptions don’t have to be present, but also because I might not even be engaging in a focal literacy event. I might be out eating or drinking and events of semiosis happen that become salient links in trajectories of literate activity. See, for example, the case of Lilah eating with her husband at a Mexican restaurant (Prior, 1998) or of Michele Kazmer talking with her partner at a bar (Prior & Shipka, 2003). The everyday 4-mode scheme—literate production and reception (writing and reading) and oral production and reception (speaking and listening)—offers us only problematic synecdoches for fully embodied semiotic practices in lifeworlds. Saying this, I’m simply recasting arguments that Kevin, Jody Shipka, Julie Hengst and I have made (Prior et al. 2006, Prior & Hengst, 2010; Roozen, 2010; Shipka, 2010, 2011), which recast arguments I made for literate activity and disciplinarity as units of analysis (Prior, 1998), which recast Steve Witte’s (1992) argument for unlimited semiosis rather than “writing” as the basic unit of analysis, which emerged out of the persistent problems with “writing,” “response,” and “revision” that appeared almost immediately in cognitive studies of writing processes (Witte, 1985) and classroom studies of response to writing (Freedman, 1987).
If writing is a problematic unit of analysis, then what are we to make of the claim, based on sociological interviews, that “writing is rising” (Brandt, 2015). Brandt argues that, in the intersection of new digital technologies and the rise of an information economy, writing is rising, that writing is overtaking and surpassing reading as the core practice of literacy and that writing is most strongly linked to workplace contexts (hence less free, less protected, less personal, more alienating than reading has historically been). Should we rank the four modes like baseball teams or stock? What’s up? Who is winning?
Certainly, these case studies do depict the surprisingly intense writing lives people are living. However, I see these cases as suggesting a more complex tale. Kate is writing a lot, but she is also making videos, drawing, and designing dolls. Alexandra is writing a lot (both in her school life as an engineer and in her personal life where she too is writing fan fiction), but she is also doing math, making tables, drawing, and working with audio files. And when Alexandra wants to make a table, she finds Excel on her computer, iTunes laying things out in tabular formats for music, graph paper at the store, and much more. Terri is writing a lot as she works as a nurse and is certainly feeling the kind of alienation from that writing that Brandt’s (2015) research highlights, but then she is also writing a lot in other spaces (working on a science fiction novel, writing a religious devotional, making a multimedia video for her family). Not only is she writing poems about work, but those poems are contributing centrally to her work as a nurse:
Discussing her “see me” poems during one of our interviews, Terri stated, ‘I think writing about patients in the way that I do allows me to respond to patients' and families’ needs with a patience and compassion I would not have possessed had I not stopped to consider the issues I cover in my writing.’
What I think Roozen and Erickson’s case studies suggest is that everything is rising, that what we are seeing is a profound intensification of literate and semiotic practices because we are following the practices of people sitting at the far edge of millennia of collective semiotic practice (accumulated in books, texts, computer programs, material tools, bodies, etc.).
