We can read as artists. In addition to writing about texts (oral, printed, and electronic), we can write with texts: create inventive or heuretic effects.
Or look again at the epigraph that opens this essay and consider the case of Clifford Geertz:
Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders...."(1973: 412)
In his work, Geertz does more than repeat, interpret, and critique the stories of Bali. He gives us tales of his own. He writes modern myths. Stories that model problem-solving strategies, they tell us how to do anthropology. (For example, the account alluded to in the epigraph--"Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"--solves the anthropological dilemma of how to be simultaneously an intruding professional and an invisible spectator.) Similarly, my soul story provides a myth or allegory for conceptualizing the problem of literacy in electronic culture: electracy.
Not surprisingly, these two groups remain at loggerheads, their positions intractable. Sadly, they have forgotten (repressed or ignored) James Sears. He, too, models a pedagogy. Mary Louise Pratt identifies it as "transculturation" (36). In an electronic age, it is the process whereby subjects select and invent from materials transmitted by mass culture. Its goal is to employ one methodology (hermeneutics) to bootstrap another (heuretics): that is, to divert interpretation into invention.
To find out more about how this might be done, readers might want to see: