| In 1989, Gregory Ulmer introduced the concept of electracy to name the apparatus that will supplant literacy. After several decades of negotiation and development, electracy has produced an array of potential applications. Through analysis of existing research, pedagogical application, and theoretical reflection, this dissertation advances electronic literacy, or electracy, in the context of the multimodal composition classroom.;As a means to inform the transition from literacy to electracy, I provide a series of models or "relays" that resist prescriptive or essentialized formulas and orient new applications of electracy. Most prominently, I use blues music as a relay. By holding a musical orientation to rhetorical studies I suggest an inventive new approach to the teaching and theorization of multimodal composition. This approach is not isolated to music, but is introduced in a way that allows other compositionists to invent electracy through the use of relays, which I believe functions as stepping-stones in the larger transition from literacy to electracy as an apparatus.;More than a mere instrumental advancement of digital media, the movement from literacy to electracy also includes the institutions supporting technology as well as how notions of subjectivity are being reconfigured. Therefore, and in order to further contextualize the implication of electracy as an apparatus, I analyze emerging notions of collective selfhood particularly as they appear in hacker communities. While the technical skill of breaking into computer systems is part of this process, such hacker groups as "Anonymous" realize collective social mobilization within the Internet in a way that I argue has implications for emerging notions of electronic literacy. As a whole, this outlook develops electracy as a viable method in which to understand and to teach composition in the digital age. |
