Computers and Composition 23 (2006) 246–257

Literate lives across the digital divide

Iswari P. Pandey ∗

Department of English, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA

Abstract

In this literacy narrative, I describe the contexts and consequences of print and digital literacies ina globalizing world. Through a combination of personal and contextual details, I show how cultural,linguistic, and political milieus shape and are shaped by the literate practices in the digital environment. Ialso complicate issues of access and the digital divide and conclude by making a case for understandingcultural background vis-a-vis political history in order to understand individual literacy practices ofstudents/writers.© 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Digital literacy; Literacy; Literacy narrative; Technology and technologies of literacy; Writ-ing/composition; Identity; Digital divide; Culture; Politics

1975: Nepal is under the king’s direct rule. I attend a Sanskrit School.

1980: Nepal has a referendum. I attend a public school and learn English.

1990: Nepal has democracy. I graduate with a degree in English and also acquire digitalliteracy

2002— I compose multimedia projects as a graduate student in a U.S. university and teach ina computer-assisted program.

With the above snapshots, I want to draw attention to the ways literacy learning is imbricatedin the larger politics of a society. While factually true, these vignettes also misconstrue myliteracy practices as if they evolved in a linear fashion and as if my individual desire and familyas well as class background were a nonfactor. In this piece, I develop these snapshots into aliteracy narrative to show that politics condition not only how conventional literacy learningtakes place and to what use, but also the ways literacies in emergent technologies are accessedand used. I hope such a narrative will complicate and extend our understanding of digitalliteracy as determined by wealth1 and similar discussions on the digital divide. While wealth

∗ Correspondence to: 778 David Fairleigh Court #8 Louisville, KY 40217, USA. Tel.: +1 502 638 2125.∗ Email address: iswari.pandey@louisville.edu.

1 In an influential essay on access, Charles Moran points out that access is a “function of wealth and social class”(p. 205). Although Moran highlights a fact ignored by many, writing from where he does (the United States), he

8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2006.02.004

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and social status are important preconditions for access to literacy in emergent technologies, Isuggest that discussions on the digital divide and literacy technologies must take equally intoaccount questions of state polity.

As I draft this piece in the first week of February 2005, the Internet as well as telephone ser-vices (both mobile and land lines) are shut down in Nepal, for the king, upon assuming directrule on February 1, considered these technologies political liabilities rather than communica-tion tools.2 The new education minister has since ordered for pictures of the royal family to beprinted in all school textbooks and called for a new “nationalist” educational policy. AlthoughI have been “living” as a graduate student in the United States these last five years, everypolitical or social turmoil in Nepal brings me sleepless nights as my previous literacy practicesconverge and conflict with the present ones. Composing my narrative against realities suchas these, I cannot help but situate my story of literacy learning in a politico-cultural ecology.As a narrator (and character in the narrative), then, I also find myself negotiating disparatepersonal, familial, cultural, social, and political spaces as I construct this story about my questfor digital literacy and, apparently, global citizenship. Similarly, while the digital/electronicmedia allow me to beat the limits of time and place, they also implicate me in a new divide ofglobal scale, limiting my practices only to one side of the divide although my literate behaviorson the digital front simultaneously shape and are shaped by those that lie clearly outside itspurview.

In order to give my readers a fuller view of the ways the external contexts condition (digital)literacy learning, I will devote a major portion of this piece to describing and reflecting on myprior literacy learning, that is, the predigital, and then move on to the contexts and consequencesof learning digital literacy. As my electronic literacy had several preconditions, includingliteracies in more than one language and specific milieus of those language uses, I will beginby weaving into my story the cultural, linguistic, and political contexts that had a bearing onmy experience. I will then dwell on how my literate practices in emergent technologies markand are marked by multiple contexts of culture and politics. Finally, I will demonstrate whyliteracy and writing teachers should attend to the politics of culture in order to understandindividual literacy and writing practices of students/writers. I should perhaps warn my readersat the outset that despite slightly different connotations, I use computer, electronic, and digitalliteracy interchangeably in this narrative.3

can take the political context for granted. Discussions on the digital divide also often follow the suit. I emphasizethe political context in my narrative in order to stress the role state policy plays in determining not only the courseof education but also the technologies of literacy.

2 The Internet and landlines were back in operation a few hours everyday after the first week of the “royalcoup” and then fully functional by mid-February. The mobile phone lines started working after one hundred days,although most journalists, human rights activists, and opposition activists were still denied service by late May2005. Independent radios and a few Web sites were also still closed as of May 2005.

3 Although terms like “computer literacy,” “digital literacy,” “electronic literacy,” and “technological literacy”may not always mean exactly the same thing, as Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe (2004, pp. 678–679) pointed out,I use the terms interchangeably in most cases. I do, however, follow Hawisher and Selfe when I use “computerliteracy” to mean basic computer skills, “digital” or “electronic literacy” to mean skills and values associatedwith computers and digital spaces, and “technological literacy/literacies” to suggest skills, practices, and valuesassociated with computer uses.

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I am the eldest of eight children, born into a lower-middle class family in Wami villageof Gulmi district in western Nepal in 1968, three years before the country was to see its firstcomputing machine and eight years after King Mahendra (father to current king Gyanendra)sacked a popularly elected government to impose his direct rule. Previously, the ruling Ranas,and at the time the King, enjoyed unhindered power, riding the back of an agrarian economythat facilitated social stratification along lines of caste, class, and gender. People were caughtbetween the despotic desires of the Rana oligarchs, who ruled the country as hereditary primeministers until 1951, and those of an ambitious King since 1960. When Rana Prime MinisterChandra Shamsher inaugurated the country’s first college in 1918 to name it after himself(Tri-Chandra College), he reportedly lamented that its opening was the ultimate death knellto Rana rule, a prophecy that materialized in a little over three decades. Following a briefbut tumultuous democratic interval between 1951 and 1960, the state was once again worriedthat increased levels of literacy and easy access to communication media might breed morediscontent and opposition than conformity. Education, as well as the mass media, was strictlystate-controlled even as the post-1960 governments ratcheted up the rhetoric of modernizationand “indigenous” democracy.

When government-supported schools were few and far between, my alphabetic literacybegan at home with my father teaching me to read and write in Nepali. With a degree inSanskrit, my father counted in the 23.6% of adult male literates (UNESCO, Table 5) out of anational population of about 11.5 million in 1971 (Nepal Population Repot, 2002, Table 1.2).My mother was among the 96.1% of illiterate adult females during the 1971 census (UNESCO,Table 5) but learned to read with us and was very supportive of our education. At five, I wasadmitted to a locally managed Sanskrit school with one teacher and about 25 students. Here,I learned to read Nepali and Sanskrit texts and do basic arithmetic. Learning meant reading,reciting, and regurgitating texts that I mastered at an amazing speed. In 1978, when resistanceto the king’s autocratic rule was gaining momentum, I joined the nearest public school at thetown center, which was an hour’s walk from my home.

Lest my transfer to the public school sound as a mere corollary to political exigencies at thestate level, let me narrate a fortuitous event that led to my eventual transfer, an incident thatillustrates the encounter between vernacular literacy and forces of global modernity representedby the English language in the specific context of Nepalese history. I was reading a letterin Nepali to my neighbor from her son in the British Army.4 But the seemingly innocuouscorrespondence had a few English words in the middle. I knew the individual English alphabetsbut had not heard until then how a word was uttered in English. In both the languages thatI was able to read in—Nepali and Sanskrit—graphics determined phonics; that is, words, ormore accurately, alphabets, were recited the way they were scripted, and there was no separatephonetic system. Uttering individual alphabets in a sequence, however, did not seem to makesense in English. I was so flabbergasted by my failure to decipher the foreign words that I

4 Following Nepal’s 1814–1816 war with the East India Company that governed India, Nepal agreed to allowthe Company to recruit its youths in the EIC army. Despite the fact that the country was never directly colonized,Nepali youths still serve in the British army today. The recruitments have been much smaller in recent decades,reflecting Britain’s withdrawal from its former colonies. According to the recruitment record, the 2003 intake ofNepali/Gurkha men was 230 (“Gurkha” n.d.).

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decided I would either go to a public school or give up school. The following week, my fatheradmitted me to grade four in a public school, where English was one of the required subjects.Unknown to me at the time, this foreign language would lay the foundation for my digitalliteracy and global citizenship.

As I was acquiring English literacy, huge protests against autocratic rule forced King Biren-dra to propose a referendum. In the plebiscite held in 1980, the ruling (partyless) Panchayatsystem was declared victorious by a narrow margin over a democratic alternative amid reportsof poll rigging. The democratic reforms and development promised by the King were not real-ized. The state focus was once again on sidelining dissent and consolidating the state controlover individual lives. Educational institutions became, once again, battle grounds between theforces of political establishment and the opposition. While the curriculum was centralized,aiming at entrenching the ideology of the status quo, many teachers and students were alsousing schooling and its ethos to educate themselves and local people about national politics,although it often cost them arrest, jail, and sometimes even death. The struggle was to con-trol literacy learning and through it the future of the country. As a result, schools emergedas the sites of two competing literacies: The official literacy following a centralized curricu-lum and its oppositional version manifest in the protest literatures and rhetoric that manyteachers and students were promoting outside of classrooms. When I graduated from my highschool in 1984 and started teaching at a primary school in Malarani village, higher up inthe northwest from my home, the teaching I did also demonstrated this conflict. Two of mycolleagues and I taught the basic government-sponsored literacy at the primary school duringits regular hours, but in the evenings we ran literacy classes for the teenagers using protestliterature.

I carried on with these two politically contradictory literacies even as I joined BirendraCampus of Tribhuvan University in the central plain of Chitwan in 1985. While workingtoward my intermediate degree (1985–1987) and bachelor of arts (1987–1989), my friendsand I helped run classes for school and college students, sometimes as special coaching forexaminations and other times free for the financially needy and political activists. In fact,when the political parties were banned and much of the political activity took place in thecollege premises, the line between political activism and higher education was blurred. Thepopular movement of 1990 finally forced King Birendra to agree to a democratic constitution.As society passed through such a transition, it was but natural for the academic institutionsto be affected. The Tribhuvan University, where I was a master’s student at Kirtipur Campus,Kathmandu, between 1989 and 1993, would twice postpone its annual exams by a year, takingme four years to complete a two-year degree.

In retrospect, this long history of print and what may be called political literacy—if directinvolvement in such events can be called so—was a prelude to my digital literacy. My literaciesat different schools (Sanskrit and public) and the university, as well as involvement in politi-cal activities, were saturated with print literacy/technology. In the meantime, my knowledgeof the English language meant that I was linguistically prepared for digital literacy, whichwould be crucial to my new roles as teacher and journalist in Nepal’s post-1990 democraticcontext.

All the writing I did since my early school days through my graduation from Tribhuvan Uni-versity used the traditional paper-pen technology. The note-taking, homework, paper writing,

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or examination writing—whether as student or teacher—required nothing else. Student per-formance was tested through centralized annual examinations in which candidates handwrotetheir answers. The final two assignments required to complete my master’s degree, however,demanded a more engaged performance of literacy. They were a survey-type research report,known as the Village Profile, and the MA thesis. I got the first project typewritten becauseit did not need much revision; however, the thesis was going to require some good revision.Of course, by 1993, there were a number of secretarial services available with computer andphotocopy facilities in Kathmandu. I got it typed, and with my revision/corrections marked onthe hard copies, I had it revised. While I enjoyed the convenience of having a document savedon a floppy disk so that I didn’t have to get the whole document retyped to accommodate revi-sions as in conventional typographic technology, my own inability to work with the machinewas a pain in the neck. Fortunately, that opportunity became available in 1996 when I joinedthe Everest Herald, a national daily in English, as a subeditor. It was here that I learned to useword-processing software, beginning with basic skills such as running spell checkers; moving,replacing, or deleting words and blocks of text on the screen; and slowly typing up short textsand page-making. The newspaper was one among many such adventures in the publicationsector in the post-1990 democratic setup.

The reason I have been dwelling on the political history of Nepal in this narrative aboutliteracy is that state ideology, at least in Nepal’s case, shapes not only the course of learningas carried out in schools and colleges but also the technology of literacy. The increasingavailability of computers and telephone lines in the post-1990 Nepal was not just a result ofany sudden economic or technological boom (Nepal is still one of the poorest countries inthe world), but that of the new political environment, which was more middle-class friendlythan the previous one dominated by the nobility. The radical nature of this change, althoughlimited to a few beneficiaries in the city centers, would be obvious if we only looked back tothe almost nonexistent level of computer technology and Internet connectivity in the countryin previous decades. The rise of a new middle class with modern education and contact withthe outer world helped the popular movement of 1990, whose success accelerated diffusion ofliteracies in emergent technologies largely in the interest of that class.

Nepal imported its first computation machine, “a second generation main frame IBM-1401,”for the 1971 national census data, and the second one would arrive only for another nationalcensus in 1981, this time “a British-made ICL 2950” (Bhattarai, 2002). While that was the paceat which the government was working to introduce computing technology to the country, theprivate sector had an equally humble beginning. The founder of Mercantile Communications,the country’s “first and biggest” computer and Internet service provider today, “had purchasedhis first computer, an Apple–II plus,” in about 1982 after he took “some programming classesat a local training centre, which [. . .] did not even have one machine to actually work on inthose days; TV screens served as monitors and cassette tapes were used to record programs”(Bhattarai, 2002). Access to computer literacy was extremely limited as was the opportunityto political power. Although the Budhanilkantha School became one of the first to introducelimited computer classes as part of its regular curriculum in 1986 (“Budhanilkantha” n.d.) anda handful of other private schools followed the suit, digital literacy was the privilege of anexclusive class. By 1990, the digitally literate population was so negligible that it comprised ofless than one person per thousand (>0.1%) (UN, 2003). It was only in the post-1990’s polyvocal

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Nepal that the plurality of compositional and communications media could be noticed in a fewmajor cities.

The changes in the communications information policy as a result of the 1990’s democraticmovement ushered in different kinds of mass media requiring an accelerated use of computers.However, as computers were still not common, their ownership and literacy indicated a highlevel of cultural capital. For example, a single desktop computer would have cost me morethan my annual teaching salary in the early 1990s. Even by 1996, when I was working for anewspaper, the editing and reporting staff did not have enough familiarity with these machines.The editorial staff used word processing for only a limited range of activities—more specif-ically, for adding, deleting, or correcting words and sentences—while the typing was doneby the staff members designated as “operators,” indicating the customary division of labor, aremnant of a strictly hierarchized feudal social structure, now dividing the newly emerged classof better-paid journalists from the “computer operators.” It was reminiscent of the way typo-graphic technology transformed the previous gentry-peasant relationship into the governmentofficer and his typist. But the division also indicated the journalists’ level of familiarity with thecomputing machines. Nobody except two members in the entire reporting/editing staff coulddirectly type their reports on to the screen, and out of a total staff of about 50, only two—oneeditorial assistant, who was a former minister’s son, and one reporter, who was educated inSingapore—owned a laptop. The small room with the server in the office building was theholiest of rooms, the person in charge of it requiring everyone to take their shoes off beforegetting in. The expensive, imported computers lay in a couple of rooms commanding awe,although, as soon as these machines were assembled locally, their extra-terrestrial glamourwas gone for at least those who could afford them.

When I learned to compose with computer during my work with the newspaper, the Kirtipurcampus of Tribhuvan University, where I started teaching in 1997, had then recently acquireda limited number of computers. The few of us who knew word processing were charged withpreparing the department’s library catalogue. Other uses of the machines were restricted topreparing official correspondence and letters of recommendation, again typed by the officeassistant. Among the academic institutions in the capital city, computer access and use wereclearly aligned along the axes of wealth. While the students at the Kirtipur campus, like otherpublic schools or colleges, would have no access to the four computer machines, the privatecollege I was teaching at part-time since 1998 used to run full-fledged computer classes.Students in this college, as in other private schools and colleges in the Kathmandu Valley, hada considerable degree of computer literacy. The amount of writing done by computer variedfrom institution to institution, but all these private schools required some types of writings, likethose for essay-writing competitions, to be computer-typed and printed. A majority of thesestudents had a computer at home, as they came from educated and/or well-to-do families.

In my own case, partly because locally assembled computers were cheaper now and partlyto meet my need as a teacher at two colleges, I bought a desktop computer in early 2000. ThePC would be one of the 50,000 in the whole country (Dhakal, 2001). I also became one ofthe 100,000 Internet users (Dhakal, 2001) in a country of about 24 million at the time. In themeantime, I was admitted to graduate studies at a U.S. university, and I came to the UnitedStates where I use the computer for a range of activities. I have a laptop and a desktop computerwith fast Internet access, and my family back home in Nepal has a desktop PC. From writing

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papers and accessing the Web to research, use email, read news and (voice-)chat, play games,listen to music, and network, computers and the Internet have become an integral part of mylife. The more I grow and meet different personal, scholarly/professional, and other demands,the more I seem to depend on this technology.

Literacy narratives, whether print or electronic, usually end on a linear, progressive note.In my story, I may seem to emerge as the hero, conquering and transcending all the oddsin the way. After all, the village I was born and raised in still has no electricity in 2005, letalone computer or Internet access. When I was in high school, a handful of households in themarketplace area had lighting facilities in their homes thanks to a limited amount of powergenerated from a local water mill. Because my home was located at an hour’s walk from thetown center, having power at home was out of the question. In such a backdrop, my digitalliteracy had to happen later and elsewhere. Now that I am constructing this narrative, morecoherent than perhaps it was as I lived through those moments, my story, therefore, runs therisk of reproducing the hero narrative if I do not mention at least two things: the politics ofuse and the politics of place. These politics bear significantly on my literate practices in thedigital environment.

First, the politics of use. Although my family in Nepal has a desktop computer at home now,it is only among fewer than 1,50,000 PCs in the entire country of about 24 million people (UN,2003). Nor can everyone even in my family use this machine equally well. Even as my parentscounted in the 42.9% of the country’s literate adults in 2001 (UN, 2003), they have neitherEnglish nor electronic literacy. When they want to communicate with me via email or onlinechat, they have to ask my brother or college-going sister to translate and type their messages.They need translation once again when I reply to their emails. While the computer technologyhas facilitated our communication, it has also brought about some problems associated withlanguage and literacies. If I could use Nepali for emails and send instant messages in thatlanguage, and (if they also had that capability), I could reach a lot more of my friends andfamily members. So could they.

And second, the politics of place are what seem to decide access. The computer in our homeback in Nepal is in the house recently built in Chitwan district, central Nepal, where I went tocollege, and not in the hilly district of Gulmi where I was born, raised, and schooled, and wheremy parents still live most of the year. Even the primitive telephone connection started there in1994 went out of service in 2001, when the Maoist guerrillas blew off the repeater tower todisrupt telecommunication links to the entire area, claiming that the government forces wereusing the lines for espionage.5 This has limited my connection to Chitwan, where my parentsoccasionally visit and where my sister and three brothers live. The only way I can contact myfriends and relatives in Gulmi and elsewhere with no Internet access is by snail mail, which,in a country torn by a civil war amid class and regional disparities, is highly unreliable.

In this way, the politics of place undercut the prevailing myths about computer and theInternet as neutral and world-wide medium. However, digital literacy has not meant a com-plete break from my past literate practices either. Twelve years down the road since my firstencounter with computers, I still continue to write an outline on paper, noting major thoughts

5 The Maoist insurgency in Nepal began in 1996 amid growing social and economic inequities. Although Gulmiis not a district most affected by the conflict, it is a major transit point for the rebels.

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and arguments before I start typing although the amount I write on paper is not always thesame and the practice more fluid than fast. As Deborah Brandt says, “Learning to read andwrite necessitates an engagement with [. . .] the layers of literacy’s past, present, and future,often embodied in materials and tools” (1995, p. 666). Having an outline ready on paper, Ifind it convenient to expand on my initial thoughts on the keyboard, an experience most ofmy student-writers in Nepal and some in the United States shared with me, although each hashis or her individual point of departure. If a paper outline helps me organize my thoughts andfind a focus, digital literacy readily provides me with the opportunity to revise, restructure,and redesign my work with greater efficiency.

Digital literacy shares many of the same features that Deborah Brandt (1995) identifies inconventional literacy learning: It is highly contextualized, develops in nonacademic settings,and is often reappropriated for divergent uses. Like its conventional counterpart (i.e. printliteracy), technological literacy, too, is often misconceived as a set of discrete, functionalskills separate from the social contexts and cultures in which they are embedded. Because ofits novelty and networking potentials, however, electronic literacy is prone to being depictedas even more context-neutral than conventional literacy. For example, introducing their jointlyedited collection of essays, Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web, Gail Hawisher andCynthia Selfe (2000) identified a “utopian and ethnocentric narrative” about the computersand the Internet in the industrialized West. According to Hawisher and Selfe, this narrativewrongly assumes an easy access for world’s peoples to electronic literacy. More specifically,it presupposes that

sophisticated computer networks—manufactured by far-sighted scientists and engineers edu-cated within democratic and highly technological cultures—will serve to connect the world’speoples in a vast global community that transcends current geopolitical borders. Linked throughthis electronic community, the peoples of the world will discover and communicate about theircommon concerns, needs, and interests using the culturally neutral medium of computer-basedcommunication. (pp. 1–2)

As Hawisher and Selfe note, the electronic medium is far from neutral, and it is imbricatedin the many layers of socio-cultural, economic, and similar aspects of local and global politics,which make electronic literacy largely a product of what Barton (1994) and Hawisher andSelfe (2004) considered larger “cultural ecology.” Moreover, given the increasing control andsurveillance of this technology at the national and international level,6 the whole idea of theInternet as a global and independent medium is suspect.

The political consideration of the digital technology and its literacy aside, Gregory andWilliams (2000) pointed out assumptions that equate poverty with illiteracy, a one way, causalrelationship between poverty and illiteracy (pp. 1–2). Such assumptions often ignore the possi-bility of individual agency to overcome the context-specific limitations not visible from purelydeterministic screens. Such a possibility should be noted with caution, however, because a

6 See, for example, a CNN (2005) report: “The U.S. government will indefinitely retain oversight of the maincomputers that control traffic on the Internet, ignoring calls by some countries to turn the function over to aninternational body,” the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), as was agreed in 1998.While the military consideration behind the invention and development of computers and Internet is recognized,reports such as these make it difficult to determine what is really free and independent.

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broad generalization based on individual cases fails to see the specific circumstances workingin favor of the person(s) in question as opposed to those of the less “fortunate” masses. Whilethe context cannot always completely keep the individual’s attempts in check, the individualcannot totally ignore the reality surrounding him or her either, for not only are the content andmethods of literacy learning controlled by the powers-that-be, but so is literacy technology.Therefore, even as the individual ploughs through his or her surroundings to achieve thoseliteracies that would not be available in his or her location of birth and schooling, the socialand cultural practices continue to haunt the future literate practices in emergent technologies.

Similarly, the simultaneity of multiple layers of contexts in any individual literacy act rendersproblematic the grand narratives about the digital divide. Although one may literally dividethe world into two blocks between those who have access to digital literacy and those whodo not, this binary overshadows the political economy responsible for this divide. Moreover,it has no room for the complexities involved in crossing the border and the ways one shapesthe other, virtually spreading one’s life (like mine) across the divide. As Deborah Brandtargued, becoming literate depends on a range of social, political, and economic forces (1998).Individual wills often evaporate under the heat of these forces. Apparently, my family’s abilityto support me was instrumental to my education in the public schools that would not onlytake children away from family work but would also require fees to be paid. In the meantime,my switch to English and science education from a more conventional Sanskrit school was,to some extent, symptomatic of society’s gradual but difficult transition to modernity. Thebilingual character of the letter was the first in the series of contacts I was to have with theseductive forces of modernity and globalization. In that contact zone, I was trying to constructan identity for myself for which the literacies in some local as well as global semiotic systemsand, finally, computer use were among the basic requirements.

As someone whose literate life has spread across the so-called digital divide, my literacypractices in the digital environment involve an ongoing negotiation. It means a constant shiftin my positioning as I move from one cultural space and technology to another (paper-pen tocomputer, for example). According to Brandt again, “as changes in literacy” take place, “literateability” means “the ability to position and reposition oneself amidst literacy’s recessive andemergent forms” (1995, p. 666). Such a shift is reflected in the content and style of my writingand also partially shaped by the medium (email or post, for example). However, my composingstyle changes even within the same medium. For example, when I email my teachers or seniorrelatives back home, I still use the honorifics like the ones I would use while addressing themin person or in conventional print letters whereas the ones that I write to my teachers, students,and colleagues in the United States are more straightforward. And then there are momentswhen I find it hard to reposition myself completely, as, say, when I need to be reminded not toaddress a friendly professor as Dr. so-and-so.

Similarly, my peers here in the United States usually find my papers more indirect andless aggressive at pursuing an argument although complaints about my indirectness are lessfrequent now. While these instances substantiate the simultaneity of different kinds and levelsof cultural and literate behaviors I have developed over the years, they are also evolvinginto more hybridized forms, forms that keep changing even as they retain some features ofdivergent cultural, linguistic, and academic literacy practices. The persistence of indirectnesseven in my discursive practices in English in the digital environment, both the language and

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the medium invariably western, deserves some serious inquiry. Of scholars in contrastiverhetoric, cross-cultural communication, and English as a second or foreign language, mostof them to the “world majority students” (Fox, 1994) and attribute this indirectness to thecultural background of those students/writers. While not unfounded, such a characterizationessentially presents culture as apolitical and ignores its dialogic relationship with politics(i.e. how it shapes and is shaped by the historical operation of political power). In Nepal’scase at least, the enculturation of indirectness has been a consequence of feudal politics. Thehierarchical structure of the society with the absolute king on top and the peasants/laborersat the bottom has been reflected in the management of education, historically. The nobilityencouraged rote learning of texts in traditional schools primarily to produce a priestly class.Even when the Sanskrit texts mentioned instances of rigorous intellectual debates and criticalthinking, those books were turned into objects of worship and means of social control throughthe promotion of rote learning, the stifling of creative and critical thinking, and the developmentof an indirect language that emphasized the use of honorifics and hyperboles. Such a methodof consuming texts and reproducing values would pose no threat to the power and privilegesof the ruling class. As a result, a rhetoric of abstraction would have a special place amongthe middle and upper class as it validated cultural knowledge. My socialization through suchdiscourse systems had to have some impact, as even the rhetoric of resistance co-opted someof these styles to function “normally.”

When consumption rather than production was valued culturally and in academic institu-tions, I did not have to do a lot of writing in the course of my school and college studies.Although regurgitation was no longer an official requirement outside the Sanskrit school, theessence was (and still is) present in the way assessments were conducted at the institutions oflearning. The three- or four-hour-long annual examinations meant that one needed to memo-rize the material fairly well in order to succeed. Still, that was not the problem; I always didwell in those exams. The problem was that argument and critical thinking often took a backseateven if these skills were emphasized in the post-1990 curriculum (instead of the loyalty to thecrown and country that the earlier curriculum intended to foster). The evaluation methods stillencouraged some form of rote learning to do well in those written exams whose results alonewould count officially. Worse, even though some instructors or courses emphasized argument,critique, text production, and opening new lines of inquiry about language and culture in theirclasses, these practices meant little in the final results.7 It is this history of cultural politicsrather than a “pure” cultural background that emerges in my literacy practices in the digital ornondigital environment.

While digital literacy provides us the speed, flexibility, and maneuverability that have helpedchange “the nature of written communication” (Selfe, 1989, p. 3) with its virtually global reach,it also comes in a mixed package of many assumptions about language, culture, wealth, and

7 Attempts to democratize literacy learning were slowly beginning to have some impact, especially with the newschool and college syllabuses of post-1990 Nepal, and they were accompanied by an easier availability of multipletechnologies of literacies. Among others, the new college English courses included not only a wider selection ofreadings (in lieu of the almost only-British writers in previous decades) but also, and more importantly, a goodportion of writing and rhetorical exercises. However, the feudal class back in the driving seat of power in thepost-February 1 (2005) Nepal has started censoring the independent media and controlling the content and formof education under its “nationalistic” education policy.

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politics. As those assumptions govern the default settings of the technologies of literacies,they tend to ignore nondominant positions and perspectives. Therefore, scholars and teachersof writing with technology need to rethink any assumptions they may have about literate livesand literacy practices. The first-hand accounts of students’ literacy narratives may be goodpedagogical tools to understand and respond to diverse students/writers in more informedways, as such narratives present unique contexts and histories of individual literacy practices.However, writers and scholars also need to politicize “culture” in order to understand theirhistories more accurately. In short, like traditional literacy or its technology, digital literacyis deeply tied to economic forces and multiple contexts of culture, politics, and location.Understanding those forces and contexts is crucial to being able to appreciate individualliteracy practices involving one or the other technologies of literacy.

Acknowledgements

I wish to extend especial thanks to Cindy Selfe for getting me to think about and composethis piece as well as helpful suggestions on this and other work. I am also grateful to GailHawisher, Anne-Marie Pederson, and the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback on myearlier draft of this essay.

Iswari Pandey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the Uni-versity of Louisville. His interests include literacy studies, composition, cross-cultural rhetorics, the postcolonial, and multimedia studies. He can be reached at<iswari.pandey@louisville.edu>.

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