The authors state that we may put other words – computer, visual, digital – in front of literacy because it automatically elevates the adjective. They argue that we need to either change how we see literacy and/or change the term we use to separate ourselves from the baggage of literacy. First, we could change literacy to mean “the ability to move in the new-technology spaces of information, the ability to make the instantaneous connections between informational objects that allow us to see them all at once” (363). If we can see them all at once, we break down linearity and hierarchies. It also helps us change how we see subjectivities. In the old version of literacy, “we rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet like (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and what will come” (364). On the other hand, in seeing literacy as space (as opposed to time), “it is impossible to believe in the unity of signle, stable subject…[I]n understanding the implications of a postmodern world-view, we open ourselves to the possibility of remaking cultural meaning and identities” (365). There is also more agency: “There is the possibility of seeing sources as not just moving through information, but of us moving through it and manking and changing conscious constructions of it as we go” (366). They name a few other names for this perspective, including Stuart Hall’s articulation, which allows for connections among disparate parts and for rearticulation.
Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola critique our use of the word “literacy” to non-print literacies. They argue that we carry with the term literacy two bits of baggage: (1) We carry with “literacy” an autonomous view of literacy, believing that literacy is divorced from context and ideology. At the same time, we carry with it the literacy myth, that process and civilization comes with literacy education. These two things together allow us to blame those who are poor because we can suggest that they are either too stupid or too lazy to learn these acontextual skills in order to better their lives. (2) We carry with “literacy” the valorization of the object of the book. “To the book…[we] attribute our sense of self, our memories, our possibilities, the specific linear forms of analysis we use, our attitude towards knowledge, our belief in the authority of certain kinds of knowledge, our sense of the world…If the first bundle that comes with ‘literacy’ is the promise of social, political, and economic improvement, it is because the second bumble is the book, which covers who we are and what we might be and the institutions in which we act” (359).
The authors state that we may put other words – computer, visual, digital – in front of literacy because it automatically elevates the adjective. They argue that we need to either change how we see literacy and/or change the term we use to separate ourselves from the baggage of literacy. First, we could change literacy to mean “the ability to move in the new-technology spaces of information, the ability to make the instantaneous connections between informational objects that allow us to see them all at once” (363). If we can see them all at once, we break down linearity and hierarchies. It also helps us change how we see subjectivities. In the old version of literacy, “we rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet like (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and what will come” (364). On the other hand, in seeing literacy as space (as opposed to time), “it is impossible to believe in the unity of signle, stable subject…[I]n understanding the implications of a postmodern world-view, we open ourselves to the possibility of remaking cultural meaning and identities” (365). There is also more agency: “There is the possibility of seeing sources as not just moving through information, but of us moving through it and manking and changing conscious constructions of it as we go” (366). They name a few other names for this perspective, including Stuart Hall’s articulation, which allows for connections among disparate parts and for rearticulation.
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