Contemporary Young Adult Dystopias: Brave New Teenagers employs depth and nuance in exploring the multiplicity of themes, motivations, and effects of the genre of young adult dystopias. Each of its four parts have an autonomous aesthetic, much like the one that it addresses in “Part I Freedom and Constraint,” but when read in totality have a cohesion that I’ve yet to feel in past readings. Perhaps it is my closeness to the genre, it’s value to my own academic study, or a testament to the works it brings together, but this anthology is by far a favorite of mine to date.

Operating under the lens of a scholar of digital humanities, I am particularly attracted to one chapter of this text. Kristi McDuffie’s “Technology and Models of Literacy in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction” taps into a contemporary discourse that many digital humanities scholars are conscious of in their own work. Using this chapter as a focal point, I intend on asserting some of my key takeaways from the larger text.

Kristi McDuffie positions the following thesis for her chapter:

“A common theme of this genre is that in the future, due to significant technological advances, many people have lost traditional forms of literacy like writing by hand. This fear that technology is causing illiteracy is widespread in contemporary society today, where teachers, parents, popular essayists, and others complain about the current generation’s addiction to texting and reluctance to read. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that these fears should emerge in texts aimed at young adults themselves.” (McDuffie, p. 145).

Before diving into her primary works, McDuffie takes a valuable detour into non-fiction. Fear is the major theme here and throughout the larger genre of YA dystopia. Technophobia in particular is illustrated to be a trend in non-fiction that has a mirror in YA dystopia. Discussing concepts like the cognitive effects of technology use via John Brockman’s Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (2011), Hayles generational attention differences manifested in deep versus hyper attention of older and younger generations respectively, as well as the stupefication of youth through social media fueled selfishness and substanceless media consumption in the digital age via Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008) (McDuffie).

McDuffie then reads four YA dystopian novels: M.T. Anderson’s Feed, Ally Condie’s Matched, Scott Westerfield’s Uglies, and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.

Feed is chosen for its mirroring of non-fiction fears of illiteracy driven by technology. Anderson uses the trope of ultra-futuristic extremes of technology to create a world where people’s communication occurs through implants directly housed in their brains. This sort of technology is both invasive and uncomfortable for the reader. Over exaggeration of contemporary colloquial language is used to illustrate a growing illiteracy within the pages of Feed. We read an excerpt of the novel that is cringe worthy to say the least. The technological advances made in person to person communication that allow people to be less reliant on language and speaking are an obvious commentary on the use of mobile and web based communication. This kind of fear of traditional literacy being replaced by new forms of communication is something that many scholars face. In the humanities in particular, using technology to peer review, blogging, and using social media to discuss academic issues is often criticized for dumbing down our ability at an academic caliber. This very blog post may be looked upon with distrustful eyes from more traditional scholars who do not understand the value of open commentary.

“Reading and Writing as Resistance in Matched” is a section that addresses the place of traditional literacy in a technologically advanced society. The world of Matched has outlawed these traditional forms of literacy. Here, again, we see a fear taken to an extreme in an attempt to comment on a greater question of modernizing societies. In an act of rebellion, the protagonist reads, then writes. Traditional literacy in this text is presented as a beautiful and freeing form in contrast to the controls and detriment of technology. This romantic relationship with the forms of old emerge when questions of archives and digitization arise in digital humanities. What do we do with the handwritten texts? What do we do with material once it is digitized? What is the value of handwriting in academia when we can produce directly on our multiplicity of devices? As print culture dies a slow, painful death, where will print artifacts and methodologies fit into the scheme of the future.

McDuffie’s exploration of Uglies follows a similar vein. Traditional and digital literacy is at odds with one another. The view of it is complicated. The black and white assumptions of the question are easily oversimplified and it takes a nuanced discussion and approach to truly dig deep. Moving to multiliteracies, we are faced with models of literacy that do not favor traditional or digital, but rather incorporate the two together. The agency of traditional and digital literacy is provided as the most productive approach to understanding the two and their place in society.

Finally, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is presented as a prime source for understanding digital literacy. Digital literacy is provided as a form of agency for the protagonist of this text. In a police state driven by surveillance and monitoring, technological literacy allows the protagonist to gain a sense of control. Rather than allow the imposing technological destruction of society, the protagonist becomes an empowered resistor. Technology in this text plays both positive and negative roles, but the main theme is the ability to operate with powerful freedom in an otherwise restricted society due to the digital literacy of a young and intelligent person. Resistance is not limited, but rather it is fueled by technology in this text. This is an attitude that digital humanities scholars hold close to themselves. Technology is not threatening academia. It is empowering academics to explore quantitative, collaborative, and immersive theories and methodologies that have not been available to us before. Accessibility of primary and secondary sources is exploding as archives grow and more people come online. The sciences are no longer the only place for data to be manipulated and employed to create arguments. Digital humanities has a lot invested in the development of digital literacy. The relationship between traditional and digital literacy is something that many are continuing to flesh out. YA dystopian literature is an important part of that equation because of it’s audience and the fact that as this audience grows, what we say now will have a direct effect on the future of our institutions. For better or for worse.