Technology is the vehicle that has brought about many of society’s changes. Now more than ever technology is changing how we read, write and interact with the products of a literate society. “More and more people are expected to do more and more things with reading and writing” (Brandt 2001 qtd. in Brandt 2009). This demand has transformed society into an information/knowledge economy that benefits from the products of literacy. There exists a whole industry in charge of producing, managing, advertising and selling the products of writers and readers, as Brandt documents in her essay “Writing for a Living” (117).
The proliferation of multiple ways of communication (email, text messages, forums, chat rooms, social networking sites, etc.), the easy access to them from any place with a WI-FI connection and, the access provided by the internet to information from all parts of the world have changed the idea of a literate environment. One no longer needs to go to school, to a library or technology/learning center to be in a literate environment because print has transcended physical spaces to be forever available through the web.
The future short story that Warlick describes on his first chapter (1) is a perfect example of how the change in the literacy environment would be in the near future. But perhaps in one of the most important places where this change is being fostered and promoted is in academia. Selfe explains “digital multimodal texts have encouraged some teachers of composition to rediscover aurality as a valuable modality of expression” (619). Williams reflects further on how literate environments are changing because of technology scholars “focusing on electronic, multimedia, and multimodal composing” this changes are also possible because in the last decade of the 20th century technology, namely computers “developed to accommodate new forms of communicative exchanges” (638) such as online conferences, listservs, email and specialized web sites to name a few. And even thought this transition from print to digital environments has been met with shyness by some, educators are being prompted to catch up with the different technologies used to convey meaning and text that their student already know and use on a daily basis. As Warlick puts it “our students must be ‘light trained’” (18) meaning that they need to be literate to function in a fully digital environment from which we know very little about (15).
This is the moment in which reading and writing technologies are playing a bigger role. Warlick’s future story talks about technological devices that are already influencing the way we read and write. With the popularization of e-readers and more recently tablets, publishers have made available thousands of titles that are now a couple of taps of a screen away. Libraries have made their collections available electronically so users can borrow/download them directly to their devices. Thousands of blogs, fan sites and forums have also given readers great amounts of content on any topic imaginable. But we, as readers and writers have also adapted to this digital literacies that move further away from plain text. We now read and write texts enriched with hyperlinks to other sites with additional information, images, video and sound and participate in social networking sites, blogs, fan sites and forums on a regular basis. Brandt notes that “more Americans spend more time writing “because intense pressure has come to bear on the productive side of literacy, the writing side” (qtd. in Brandt 2009). This is in part because we live in an information economy but also because technology itself has facilitated communication through its different platforms and has also provided multimodal ways to convey meaning. Scholars like Williams note that “new media technologies have allowed new ways of composing and writing that bring together word, image, sound and video” (15) which presents a return to the aurality as means of expression existent in the 18th and 19th centuries.
These technologies are also reshaping reading and writing practices. “New technologies have, through the ease with which they allow interaction and the appropriation and combination of multiple media, vastly increased the number of people engaging in interactive popular culture activities” (Williams 13). They have also demonstrated that people read text more critically than what it is assumed (Williams 11). By reading and writing/producing multimodal texts online readers and writers are also nurturing comprehension and critical thinking and constructing meaning off of the literacies they are practicing. More importantly, we are figuring out how to use these tools on our own. Warlick puts it this way:
At the heart of being lifelong self-educating people is a literacy that is relevant to the time and the information that surrounds them. It means that they cannot only read the information that someone hands to them, but that they can investigate and expose the truth behind that information (106).
If there is anything that the era of information has done is to provide its consumers with autonomy and independence: how-to websites, do-it-yourself blogs, video tutorials, recipe websites and forums have all contributed to encourage writers and readers to learn by themselves. The variation between print and digital literacy now is that content is not the exclusive production of experts. In the World Wide Web everybody is a teacher and a student. The downside of this situation is that accuracy and truthfulness are not always part of the sources available. However, because we are constantly exposed to content we have become aware of the importance of recognizing reputable sources.
The advantages of being witnesses and participants of this transition stage is that are able to play a more central role in defining what this new literacy of the 21st century will be. Our generation is at the forefront of reinterpreting how print literacy, which has been the conventional form for so long, will play a part in a fully digital society and how it is going to be transformed and molded to fit the needs of a practically paperless culture.
Literacy it is also being transformed and redefined. It no longer means to be able to decode text and to use a writing system to use language. Literacy can now be the skills to make meaning out of different modalities and the skills to produce texts in different modalities outside the conventional plain text. But perhaps literacy will be something completely different to what we now know. We are at the front row of a major change in our development as a digitalized society and we will be the only generation able to tell our children how the world was before the Internet became ubiquitous. Just like our parents can tell us what was their life like without phone, or cable or before they bought their first cell phone we now too, own a piece of the history of technology.
Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy and Learning. Reflections on Writing, Reading and Society. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 2009. Print.
Selfe, Cynthia L. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” CCC. 60:4 (June 2009):616-663.
Warlick, David F. Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. Worthington, OH: Linworth Publising. 2004. Print.
Williams, Bronwyn T. Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture and Reading and Writing Online. New York: Peter Lang. 2009. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment