Defining Literacy

This week, Rebekka asked the class to think about what the term 'literacy' means in a digital world.

Interestingly, shortly after I put my last blog post up on Facebook, my cousin asked me a similar question in the comments section. An image of the exchange is posted here because...

1. I think I composed a nice little definition there, if I do say so myself, and...
2. That exchange is a an good example of reading in today's digital environment.

Some explanation of the exchange: When I posted to Facebook, I noted that my literacy narrative referred to the white-on-blue word processing screen made famous by the TV show "Doogie Howser M.D." As a result, the comments that followed include hyper-specific pop culture references alongside a discussion of the abstract concept of literacy.

I love this about digital literacy. A quality exchange normally has multiple foci. Digital literacy is found in the act of navigating all the points, counterpoints, ironic responses, non sequiturs, misfires, misunderstandings, baiting, esoteric references, and the all-too-obvious observations that are each accepted as part of the discourse.

Paul's Boutique

I'm reminded of the Beastie Boys 1989 album, Paul's Boutique. The Wikipedia page for the album's 6th track, "The Sounds of Science," lists no less than twenty-one pop culture references, and that list is nowhere near complete. Luckily, Soopageek has provided a much more complete annotated version of the song's lyric.  Here's one annotation from Soopageek's page:

Ponce De Leon constantly on
The fountain of youth not Robotron  

• Ponce De Leon was a Spanish Explorer who discovered Florida while searching for the fountain of youth.
•  Robotron: 2084 was a popular arcade video game released in 1982.

Now I know that the Beastie Boys' effort to innovate through extensive sampling and rapid-fire references from across the cultural spectrum is more of a reflection of postmodernism's influence than it is of digital literacy, but... And this is a big 'but'...

The fact that a postmodern approach to ideas had seeped so deep into our culture by 1989 has a lot to do with what digital literacy looks like today.

In our class last week, Aaron argued that for the digitally literate, the onus is on the reader to understand how a link or allusion informs the document at hand, and this is true regardless of the cultural capital the author is drawing from - from Spanish explorers to early 80s video games. Aaron's argument suggests it is no longer the author's task to anticipate the reader's frame of reference.

I resisted in class, but I'm coming around.

Here's an instance that might explain why: Today I read James Sullivan's review of William Gibson's latest book. Among other things, the review refers to Skip Spence's 1969 album "Oar," the post-hippie era, Jorge Luis Borges, eBay, politics in Singapore, and of course Gibson's entire body of speculative fiction.

I was on a website I visit regularly reading about an author with whom I am familiar. Nevertheless, I had to look up Skip Spence (good stuff, btw).

It's not the number of references that requires a new kind of literacy, it's the range. A reader attempting to take in the full meaning of that review needs to have access to such a broad swath of cultural knowledge that internet search becomes a necessary part of the reading process.

In fact, readers now expect digital texts to send them off searching. If readers aren't moved to teach themselves something new as a result of a digital document, than the author isn't properly taking advantage of the medium. And if that's the case, then the author is not fully digitally literate.

So, if we lost functions of memory in the shift from an oral to a literate culture, as Wolf and Hass suggest, then perhaps we'll have to sacrifice the concept of individuals owning cultural capital in the shift to a digital culture.