Additionally, they emphasize that a text creates meaning, but that the text’s content may not have a literal meaning. “The meaning carried by the content might be much more relational than literal” (4). They also state, “Almost anything available online becomes a resource for diverse kinds of meaning making” (5).
The authors define “new” literacies in two areas: new technical stuff and new ethos stuff. “[I]f a literacy does not have what we call new ethos stuff we do not regard it as a new literacy, even if it has new technical stuff….We think that what is central to new literacies is…that they mobilize very different kinds of values and priorities and sensibilities than the literacies we are familiar with…The spread and realization of the new ethos stuff becomes possible with the new technologies, but the ethos stuff itself does not depend on them. Conversely, new technologies can be taken up without and, indeed, in opposition to the new ethos stuff” (7, 21). The new technical stuff “represent[s] a quantum shift beyond the typographic means of text production as well as beyond analogue forms of sound and image production” (8-9). The new ethos stuff involves a fractioned space – the coexistence of physical space and cyberspace – and a new mindset – physical-industrial versus cyberspatial-postindustral. The two mindsets are as follows:
Key Terms
- Sociocultural perspective: reading and writing can only be understood in the contexts of social, cultural, political, economic, historical practices to which they are integral, of which they are a part” (1).
- Discourse: “Discourses are socially recognized ways of using language (reading, writing, speaking, listening), gestures and other semiotics (images, sounds, graphics, signs, codes), as well as ways of thinking, believing, feeling, valuing, acting/doing and interacting in relation to people and things, such that we can be identified and recognized as being a member of a social meaningful group, or as playing a socially meaningful role” (Gee’s concept 3).
- Literacy (according to the authors): “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within context of participating in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” (4)
- Social practice: “socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks” (Scribner and Cole’s definition 4)
- Literacy practice: “particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts” (Street’s definition 4)
- Encoded texts: “texts that have been rendered in a form that allows them to be retrieved, worked with, and made available independently of the physical presence of another person…Encoded texts give (semi) permanence, transcendence, and transportability to language that is not available in the immediacy of speech, hand signs, and the like” (5).
- Situated selves: the coordination among thinking and feeling, rules, institutions, accessories, clothes and on that works to “tell us who and what [a] person is” (6).
- Folksonomy: “the practice of user annotations to help categorize and manage information within a field of endeavor…Tagging has generated a ‘bottom up’ approach to providing metadata for classifying online content to enable searching” (19).
- Paradigm cases of new literacies: “have both new ‘technical stuff (digitality) and new ‘ethos stuff.’"
- Peripheral cases of new literacies: "have new ‘ethos stuff’ but not new ‘technical stuff.’"