New Media and New Literacy: Advancements or downfall of Society?

“what counts as literacy, how literacy changes in response to the new media landscape,” and what value we should ascribe to the new forms of communication that continue to emerge and evolve online. (Jenkins, 2009).

You’ve probably never had someone ask you “have you read any good tweet lately?” and it’s likely that you will not be asked to analyze and compare Facebook status posts on a standardized test any time soon, but the truth is, much of the reading we do these days is not done with a book, and much of the knowledge we attain does not come from reading.

My husband, who is a poet, novelist, and works at a college library for his day job, finds this trend very depressing and indicative of the downfall of our society. I do not. While I love books, and would not compare reading War and Peace with reading an online zine or anime comic, I do think that each has value and each probably does develop literacy, albeit a different kind of literacy.

Internet surfing for information can be very efficient, in a scatter shot way, to develop a fairly well developed knowledge of something quickly, while a book is more linear and although might develop an idea in a richer and deeper way, is ultimately a one way conversation where online learning can be more collaborative.

For acquiring information, instructions and directions give me Youtube.com and Lynda.com any day over a manual. Someone, somewhere has posted a Youtube.com instructional video on just about anything you can image and I’d much rather see how to do something, than read about it.

My son has an ill-defined reading learning disability. It’s not dyslexia, but he struggles with texts in a similar way and exhibits dysgraphia when writing.  Learning to read, and fluency with reading has not come easily for him, but he loves learning. There are several series of educational books that present various topics in the form of online comics; history, science, etc. He loves these, and devours them. He also loves books and to have someone read to him and listens to audiobooks all the time.

I do hope that he will be able to read long difficult “good for you” books one day, and that books will still exist. Reading on a tablet and scouring a website are not the same as sitting with a good book, or strolling through the stacks of a library and I very much hope that in his future he will have those experiences, but I do think that he is developing literacy when he listens to books or reads digital comics as well, and in some ways, he might be learning even more valuable skills for the future than sitting with a book.  But don’t tell that to my husband, he’ll just get depressed.

Quote"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

When trying to teach my mother how to convert a document file format for publication or to explain to her what "the cloud" is, it becomes quite clear that the landscape of literacy required for us to function well at work, school and even in our personal lives has grown so vastly, and continues to grow rapidly, leaving many feeling technologically illiterate and left in the dust. 

In fact, merely trying to talk about "new literacy" brings into question “which new literacy”, and as mentioned in the article Beyond ‘new’ literacies, the meaning of the words “new literacy” are ever changing and require that we know the contexts and the audience we are talking about. “new literacy” for my mother is certainly different than that of my son, and their ability to acquire and master the necessary skills in order to participate with and utilize any new technologies are vastly different.

            “Today, technological change happens so rapidly that the changes to literacy are limited not to technology, but rather by our ability to adapt and acquire the new literacies that emerge”. (Wilber 2010) 

My mother, having published novels in the days when the publishing industry had strictly defined roles of writer, editor, publisher, etc., can be totally baffled by the industry today with its collaborative and participatory model of self-publishing, e-publishing, print on demand and the like.

New models of storytelling, like “Participatory cultures” including “fan fiction” and interactive virtual worlds where multiple contributors participate and collaborate to weave “stories”, utilize technology to create a new, and more dynamic, collaborative and interactive space for expression.

We also see a moving away from text as the prime method of imparting information and an increased use of design to consolidate thematic ideas. As mentioned in Digital Literacies, (Barton, Gillen, 2010) 

            “image is ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and, in many domains of            communication, displacing writing where it had previously been dominant”.

This can be seen with the ever-increasing frequency of the use of “infographics” to inpart statistics, data, and other facts traditionally transmitted via text.

The move towards screens and away from the page as with the interactive virtual worlds, fosters exploration. The hypertextuality possibly with a screen vs. a static page, allows for multi-leveled exploration of a text, and for new avenues of exploration at your fingertips, including social and inter-disciplinary with ever branching connections fostering a more wholistic approach to learning.

Clearly the thrust in new and emerging technologies is the focus on connections to further learning and tools for collaboration, interaction, reflection enhancing and deepening ones  learning experience.  

References: 

Wilber, Dana. "Beyond ‘new’ literacies." Digital Cultures & Education. Digital Culture & Education, 31 May 2010. Web. 23 Jan 2014. <http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/dce_editorial_vol2_iss1_2010/>.

Barton, David, and Julia Gillen. "Digital Literacies."Technology Enhanced Learning. London Knowledge Lab Institute of Education University of London, n.d. Web. 23 Jan 2014. <http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf>.