Response to L&K Chapter 3
Chapter 3 continued to clarify, the what, and how new literacies are formed. While the majority of literacy definitions speak to reading, writing, and literature; chapter 3 Technologies and Values explains how technologies have shifted our way of thinking, making meanings, acting, and otherwise organizing the ways for doing everyday life.
This chapter helps the reader take an historical perspective of the shift to new literacies. Even as technology and the tools are rapidly shifting, historically one concept still builds upon the other. There is a continuum between the various dimensions of the different paradigms. Just as the printing press helped us encode and generate meanings the shift to binary code did not make the earlier concept of encoding and generating meaning obsolete.
To help the reader make these connections the authors used our concept of personal identity to articulate how paradigms have changed. Until relatively recently it was typical to think of a person an individual – in terms of a single identity, a core ‘self’, a more or less stable and permanent ‘personality’ of a particular ‘type’. While we recognized that individuals were ‘complex’ to some extent and in some sense, we nonetheless tended to emphasize their particularity in ‘character’, point of view, and so on. Today we are much more inclined to think of people as much more complex; indeed to make a fetish of this complexity. People see the world from many perspectives, depending on which Discourse they are ‘in’ or operating out of’ within a particular situation or context. (Knobel, 2011)
Just as our identities are multiple and shifting the writers delve into how these changes spur the development of new literacies. Not so long ago we thought in terms of people pursuing a much more linear life path or life trajectory, one job, one home, one family, one location. Today the default norm is much more complex and non-linear. For individuals who know the current state as the norm and individuals who experienced some upset(s) that moved them, the notion of organizing life around flexibility, multiplicity, dispersion, non-linearity has changed how we do life. These are not just changes in ideas and beliefs they entail changes in practices (Knobel, 2011).
The new technical stuff of new literacies facilitates the generation, communication, and negotiation of meaning in our new literacies world. Our weekly ‘daily create’ increases our ‘literacy’ using these tools and disseminating new artifacts. Using a standard computer or mobile device, an internet connection, and basic knowledge of what is now standard (Photoshop, Gimp, Screenflow, Camtasia, Filmora, etc.) software, and a few finite physical operations (click, select, drop, drag, swipe) we create, disseminate, and receive feedback almost immediately.
The chapter goes on to discuss:
Twitter, and how Twitter practices enable alternative and new ways of generating encoded meanings
Email, Social News sites like Reddit and Slashdot, Podcasts and YouTube expanding our ability to communicate encoded messages
Instant Messaging and Google Docs help us negotiate encoded meanings
This shift from material inscriptions to digital coding, from analogue to digital representations, has unleashed conditions and possibilities that are massively new (Knobel, 2011)
