I am proud to claim Dewey as

I am proud to claim Dewey as an intellectual grandparent, and I have come to believe that his work holds special importance for students of digital and media literacy. In this essay, I seek to illustrate what I take to be one of Dewey’s most pertinent insights for the field’s contemporary inquirers: that shared understanding is not the cause of but rather a result of successful cooperations in action.

My own life experience has colored my views on Dewey’s media thinking. Intellectually, I came of age in the mid-1990s. I remember sitting down to use the world’s first popular web browser, NCSA Mosaic, in the basement of my college’s library building, a few paces from the couch where I read Walter Benjamin’s (1969) “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Mosaic was a revelation. After having contended with DOS and VAX command lines, this program seemed a qualitatively better way to access computer networks. Like the hypertext software on which it was built, Mosaic allowed its users to follow links between page-like “documents” stored on different computers. (Mosaic also added support for inline images, which was an important feature for many users.)

As a child who grew up with console-based video games, I remember my fascination with the open-ended, exploratory, and emergent qualities of the early World Wide Web. Not only did my screen connect with others around the globe, but I could add to the collection of documents that others could browse. To me, Mosaic manifested how media literacy could be more than the watching, reading, and playing I had previously known.

Just over a century before, Dewey was coming to his own fin de siècle enthusiasm for communications technology. As a young professor at the University of Michigan, Dewey’s interests ranged widely across psychology, ethics, and politics, and they also included attention to developments in mass writing and communication. In 1891, Dewey wrote his colleague William James about a scheme he was hatching with former journalist and newspaper editor Franklin Ford and a group of Ann Arbor academics. In an explanation of what conversations with Ford had meant to him, Dewey (1999) shared the following prediction: “I believe that a tremendous movement is impending when the intellectual forces which have been gathering since the Renascence & Reformation shall demand complete free movement, and, by getting their physical leverage in the telegraph & printing press shall through free inquiry in a centralized way, demand the authority of all other so-called authorities.”

Building on ideas about what writing technologies like the telegraph and the printing press could accomplish, Dewey, Ford, and the others proposed to publish a new, philosophical kind of newspaper. This newspaper, to be called Thought News, was meant to stimulate individuals’ awareness of our interconnectedness in what the group called the “social organism.” The group also hoped that it would stimulate a reorganization of the existing global news industry. As Dewey and Ford believed, this broad change in news gathering and news publication would begin a worldwide democratic transformation of economic, political, and social activity.

Like the 1890s, the 1990s saw more than its share of visionary technology projects. When I was a graduate student, the project that particularly caught my attention was one that built on the successes of programs like Mosaic. Proponents of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) argued that although the establishment of web pages gave computer networks a user interface drawn in two dimensions, what humans really needed was an interface built in three dimensions. Through the Web3D Consortium, work continues today on standards for sharing three-dimensional graphics on the World Wide Web. VRML, first specified in 1994, was the first major attempt to network these data types. For their part, VRML’s proponents proposed that we should experience the web not on pages but in virtual worlds. VRML’s main public advocate, Mark Pesce, suggested potentially far-reaching benefits for a “world”-based web interface, including fundamental changes to the Internet and improvements to democratic participation (Dyehouse 2009).

As it happened, however, this virtual world-building technology came to little. The project suffered from problems related to the slow data-transfer rates characteristic of dial-up connections. In addition, VRML users struggled to know what to do with the technology. I remember feeling genuinely disappointed to realize that VRML would not catalyze the broad technical, social, and political changes for which I had hoped. In retrospect, of course, I see that my expectations for a virtual reality-based World Wide Web were not just unrealistic but impossible. At the time, however, the world seemed precisely this one technology short of radical transformation.