In Defense of Reason(s): Critical Digital Fluencies, Writing Studies, and the Importance of Explaining Why

As English teachers, we all work in a manufactured environment filled with essays. We assign prompts; students write responses; we grade the quality of their work. Lather, rinse, repeat. As residents of the allegedly “United” States, we all live in a social environment filled with executive orders, legislative actions, corporate policies, a 24-hour news cycle, social-media marketing, and civil unrest. Both sides of our political machine bemoan the loss of reason in our system, yet social discourse is open and accessible to more people than ever. If you have an opinion on something, there’s a platform for you to use to extoll those thoughts to an expansive audience. It’s just a matter of which cis-gendered straight white male billionaire owns the platform on which you post those thoughts.

I can’t help but be both amazed and distraught by how easily the idea of posting ideas online pivots from opportunity to oppression. If we want students to become active, participatory members of society—a big assumption, but hear me out—we need to help students understand what that participation looks like…and what it entails.

The Nature of the Internet

The nature of online environments has shifted dramatically in the decades since the public Internet exploded in popularity. It started as a public forum known—especially to the straight, middle-class white dudes who commandeered it—as an egalitarian space where anyone could say whatever they wanted and ideas were judged on their merits, apart from the author’s identity. Allegedly.

That understanding of the Internet, which could in retrospect be considered “Web 1.0”, relied on the public distribution of free information from established sources. Web 2.0, in contrast, relies on public contribution of user-generated information collected in established repositories. Blogs and sites like Wikipedia build their value by what people contribute to them. Open access to information still stands as a key feature of this system. Generally speaking, we still operate in a Web 2.0 environment.

The Web of Today

But I want to assert a key difference, creating what I’m going to call Web 3.0. (This definition of the term is not the commonly held one, so don’t quote me on it, but I think it’s a useful framing for discussion.) In Web 3.0, content, regardless of its origin or storage location, is personalized. When you visit a website, what you see is tailored to you and might be very different from what I see at that same URL. In this environment, the Internet is “personalized” by virtue of tracking systems, predictive analytics, and ad brokers.

While I’m creating arbitrary, catchy buzzwords, I’ll go a step further and say today’s online experience (dare I call it Web 4.0?) often involves machine-generated personalized content. These are programmatic spaces, in which the material we see is not authored by a vetted source (Web 1.0), crowdsourced from user contributions and vetted by upvoting (Web 2.0), or even algorithmically selected to appeal to our personal interests (Web 3.0). In today’s programmatic spaces fueled by generative AI, what we see can be created on-demand just for us, without any effective means of verifying its credibility.

Student Agency

Where in all this does a student’s voice belong?

I opened by asserting that students should learn to be active, productive members of society. If that’s true, the most obvious forum for participation is of course online spaces. However, merely accessing a major platform today involves engagement with trackers and other technologies designed to mine users’ data and behavior profiles. That means encouraging online participation necessarily includes an implicit endorsement of these systems that, in the words of Jaron Lanier from The Social Dilemma (2020), aim to subtly shift our behavior. As higher-ed faculty, especially for those of us at public institutions, such endorsements are anathema to our missions. We should take issue with any procedure (institutional or classroom-based) that requires students to sign up for a new platform, engage with an ad network, or otherwise create a personal behavioral profile. (I explore this argument in greater detail in my discussion of Humane Education.)

Unless we are teaching students to program AI models—which no one I know thinks of doing in any English department—what chance do we have to help students find their own voices and make meaningful contributions to public discourse? The solution, I assert, is critical digital fluencies. Specifically, I assert that students need to learn a heuristic approach to employing critical digital fluencies in online spaces. And though I may be just a bit biased, I also assert that writing teachers are the best positioned to help students develop those vital skills.

Heuristics v. Algorithms: Teaching Reason-Driven Online Behaviors

In his landmark “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block,” Mike Rose highlighted the distinction between algorithmic and heuristic approaches to writing, finding that the former leads to writer’s block, while the latter helps students navigate challenging writing situations.

Algorithms in Writing

In short, an algorithm is a set of clear, specific instructions designed to be followed precisely in a specific (and often recurring) situation. In writing situations, algorithms generally take the form of rules we expect students to follow. Examples include things like:

• Never start a sentence with because.
• Always end your intro paragraph with a one-sentence thesis.
• Open every essay with an attention-grabber.
• “I before E except after C.”

That last example highlights the problem with algorithms: They frequently fail in procedures as complex and messy as writing. If we teach students the I-before-E spelling rule, we create problems for them any time they want to write about their weird neighbor. I’ve had students in their second year of undergraduate studies who would not begin a sentence with “because”, not knowing that the “rule” they learned in elementary school was intended as a temporary stop-gap, not an absolute. My point here is this: When we teach writing rules, students will invariably find exceptions to those rules. And when they do, writing becomes frustrating—”stifling”, to use Rose’s word.

Heuristics in Writing

By contrast, heuristics are broad guidelines or “rules of thumb”, not strict instructions. The hallmark of an effective heuristic is that in can help inform someone’s approach to a thorny situation and make it easier for them to reach an appropriate or effective conclusion. In writing situations, heuristics generally take the form of reminders and prioritizations. Examples include things like these from Rose (1980, p. 396):

• “Try to keep the audience in mind.”
• “Use as many ideas in my thesis paragraph as I need and then develop paragraphs for each idea.”

In short, heuristics work when people know why they matter. When students are taught to never start with “because”, that rule shuts them down later and does them a disservice. But the heuristic of varying sentence structures to avoid monotonous pacing? That can help in widely dissimilar situations, proving useful in many contexts. For that matter, writers could apply the principle behind such a heuristic in other situations, such as varying paragraph lengths for emphasis or varying speech volume for effect.

A good algorithm works right out of the box. A good heuristic helps even when thinking outside the box.

Heuristics Online

Now consider how we manage our everyday lives in online spaces. If we used mental algorithms to process our social-media feeds or detect phishing scams or determine what’s an ad versus what’s real content, we’d get more bogged-down than our browser windows with hundreds of tabs open. (But I’m sure you have no idea what that’s like, right?)

Instead, we develop heuristics for detecting spam our filters miss, for ignoring ads our blockers miss, for determining which search result to click on, for figuring out which filter makes our pets look the cutest in our posts. You see my point: Life online requires heuristics. Those of us who teach heuristics for writing already know how this goes, and we need to apply our existing skills to teaching in new environments. We need to help students develop their own heuristics for existing online.

Critical Digital Fluencies: Applying Reason to Online Identity Formation

In a 2021 Computers and Composition piece, Estee Beck collaborated with students to outline their experiences in a Critical Digital Literacies course that helped students develop tactics for resisting online surveillance and privacy erosion. As I, too, want to help students resist the nefarious agents of online oppression, I tried replicating her experience with students at Kean. I’m currently working on an article reviewing that experience, but for now let’s say it didn’t quite live up to my hopes. I went into the class hoping to get students worked up and ready to not just change their own behaviors but to also advocate for solutions we could share across campus.

The outcome? A resounding “Meh.”

Student (Dis)Interest

Students were content with simply knowing things instead of taking action against things. They appreciated their new understanding of the forces at work online and the ways in which companies work to collect data and influence behavior. But they expressed no interest in resisting those influences or protecting their data.

It was then that I realized the distinction between digital literacies and digital fluencies. Students wanted to build their literacies—to be able to speak the language of online interactions. But they had no desire to develop digital fluencies to navigate online engagement with greater sophistication. One student in particular has a popular account on TikTok—don’t get me started on the horrors of TikTok—and she was shocked to discover how that platform controls her content, both explicitly and implicitly. She gained a new appreciation for how her time and labor were being exploited for the benefit of the platform more than anything else. And yet she said she intends to change nothing.

The Insufficiency of Literacy

From that class, I’ve gained a new appreciation for (or sensitivity to, I’m not sure) the popularity of the phrase “information literacy” in library education. I’m now convinced that developing students’ digital literacies is insufficient in light of the complexity and sophistication of today’s online environments. We should instead aim to teach digital information fluencies with the express intent of helping students learn how to shape and protect their identities online. They also need to learn how to operate within, and resist when necessary, the platforms on which we build and share so much of our lives.

Literacy education sufficed when print media reigned supreme. If we taught students to read critically, they were set. Students who could read critically could navigate their print-saturated worlds with intention and awareness. Then, with the explosive popularity of visual (and especially video) content, critical reading skills were no longer enough. Remember how folks used to complain that television would rot kids’ brains? Education never really found a way to overcome that challenge. And now we have personalized websites and targeted advertising and deep-fake video and AI-generated content and all manner of diversions, distractions, and manipulations—and education can’t even keep up with teaching students to understand them, much less use or resist them.

Building Resilient, Reasoned, Engaged Students

Forty-five years ago, Rose’s students suffered stifling writer’s block from an over-reliance on rigid, algorithmic rules when writing their essays. Similarly, today’s students suffer from a stifling over-reliance on algorithmic platforms when living their digitally connected lives. We need to help students build flexible heuristics based on critical digital fluency so they can build their own identities, protect their own data, and resist the constant battle for their attention, their clicks, and, ultimately, their agency.

By helping students understand the reason the internet works the way it does and why the platforms they use operate as they do, we can help students make informed choices about their lives, their time, and their data. We can help students build their reasoning skills and work within today’s connected world. We can help them build a better sense of agency and develop a greater sense of self-determination. All of this starts by explaining, discovering, or simply asking why.