Untitled and Undecided

Yesterday in my class on “Literacies: Old and New” (no course website available), we did a review of some of our past discussions on Goody and Watt’s “The Consequences of Literacy” (1968), parts of Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind, and excerpts from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. Our purpose in reading these works (and others in the next few weeks) is to get a sense of some “classical” views and theories of literacy as we turn towards what ideas of “new” literacies might mean.

All of these readings argue for distinctions and differences between primarily oral cultures and ones that have a system of reading and writing. To greater and lesser extents, they have been criticized for being being overly technological deterministic and of not paying enough attention to cultural and social practices that informed and contributed to the development of systems of reading and writing. Professor Andy DiSessa called our attention to a lack of consideration for “everyday practice” of what people actually do.

But what Prof. DiSessa also pointed out is that these pieces paint a picture of the development of writing and reading as a) taking hundreds, if not thousands, of years and b) that different social classes experience writing and reading at different stages, that a technocratic elite is usually the first to become proficient in writing and reading and then literacy gradually (through processes undefined!) becomes more widespread. The key questions for us, then, as we think about “new” literacies (depending on what that really means, of course…) include: Can we somehow identify what stage we may be at now with respect to media literacy or computational literacy? Are things changing faster now than they might have before (so tempted to say “yes!” and so wrong to assume)? Can a technocratic elite be “side-stepped”? What does this really mean?

These issues are important because more and more schools are starting to recognize that new forms of literacy should somehow be taught to students. And that “skills” associated with technological literacy are essential to survival in today’s world. This past week, for example, the Educational Testing Service announced a new test to measure “teen tech literacy”, perhaps in response to arguments like these I have some serious doubts about this initiative and this perspective on what it means to be literate.

Let’s assume for a moment that the word “literacy” even is appropriate (technological, computational, media, “new”…) it seems that what formal education is trying to do here is to push new literacy practices to the masses out of the sole domain of a technocratic elite. Sounds good. Only, I wonder who today’s technocratic elite might be with respect to these practices? I wonder if the elite can be found amongst kids and teenagers, rather than adults who seem to want to impose some “right” and “wrong” way to use technology. I guess the argument goes that kids need to be taught how to think critically about they use the technology at their disposal (if this is, in fact, part of what “literacy” means). But I also think about all of those teenagers on MySpace who are communicating through blog-like things, using images, audio, and video and can’t help but think that they are somehow learning new practices (literacies?) that put them way ahead of the rest of us. If they are elite in new forms of this multimodal, multimedia, forms of communication, what does this say about the time it might take for these practices to become a part of everyday literate culture?