What are New Literacies?

Something seems wrong

A few days ago, I tweeted something that wasn’t particularly funny, but I got an overly positive response from a Cory Folse, @jokesallnight. Now, I don’t know anyone named Cory Folse, and I don’t know who this @jokesallnight person is, either; so, I ignored the tweet, kind of glad I had made someone happy, but kind of confused.

But then a couple of days ago, I was still thinking about this weird tweet, so I decided to see who this Cory Folse person was. I clicked on his username, which showed me a list of his most recent tweets, with the most recent ones on the top…

It became clear that Cory isn’t trying to be my friend at all. He’s a spammer, someone (or perhaps a computer program) who is trying to get people to check out the @jokesallnight user. He sends random tweets to random people all the time, trying to compliment people to soften them up and make them more likely not to see through his lousy advertising. (Whatever you do, please don’t reward this behavior by looking up @jokesallnight and following that account on Twitter. I reported Cory for spam and blocked him.)

So, let’s think about the clues that Cory wasn’t really my friend. Something seemed wrong in a lot of ways: I didn’t know his name, his response didn’t make sense in context, and he never uploaded an image to represent his username. I’ve used Twitter enough to know that those three things combined often mean that a response-tweet is spam. You could say that I’m “literate” in the ways of Twitter, so I recognize when people act in “illiterate” ways.

I’m sure you know people who seem surprisingly illiterate when working with digital technology. I get forwards all the time that claim Apple or Applebee’s will give me $2,000 if I continue the forwarding chain, and others that tell me about all the stupid luxuries Democrats or travel agents have insisted on when flying. Those who are email literate recognize the signs that these things probably aren’t true (and a quick search on snopes.com usually clears up any lingering doubts about what’s a scam and what isn’t). There’s even a whole website, literallyunbelievable.org, chronicling people who read the fake news on theonion.com and think it’s real.

What’s wrong with these email-forwarders and fake-news-believers?

I suggest that they’re simply not literate in the ways of new media. They saw something that would be fishy to many readers who are better acquainted with the usual moves made in those contexts, but no alarms went off in their minds.

This article is an exploration of new media literacies, with the end goals of reminding you not to be a sucker who falls for illiterate silliness and encouraging you to rely on your new media literacies when composing with digital technology. To get there, I want us to think about why we use the word literacy to discuss these online issues, how literacy has been expanded in other contexts, and what new media has to do with it all.

The Traditional Model of Literacy

We usually think of a particular skill when we hear the word literacy—knowing how to read. When students can barely read, teachers complain, “They’re barely literate!” When politicians say, “Kids today are illiterate!” they mean that the kids can’t read—or perhaps more subtly, that they can’t read very well. That is, they don’t understand the complexities and nuances that practiced readers see in a big splattering of words on a page or screen.

The politician’s claim reminds us of another aspect of literacy that’s usually tied to the reading angle: the ability to write. When politicians rile up crowds by calling kids illiterate, they often mean, “Kids today don’t understand complex reading, and they can’t produce complex writing, either.” So implied in the skill of literacy is also the ability to write. This makes sense; if I can’t make sense of a piece of writing’s purpose, organization, figures of speech, and rhetorical moves, I probably can’t create a piece of writing that uses those aspects of writing in sophisticated ways.

And as you can hear from my examples of the teacher and the politician, literacy is often a word that shows up when people want to describe something that people don’t have. I’m unlikely to be praised for my literacy when I accurately summarize a tough essay in class, and I’m unlikely to read a particularly nice magazine article and say to the author, “Oh, you were so particularly literate in that piece!” Literacy is usually used more as a base-line for competence, something that we ought to have but that stands out most noticeably when it’s not there, like the space where a demolished building used to be, or when we see a person not wearing any pants.

New Models of Literacy

Why go into so much detail about the traditional model of literacy—the skill of knowing how to effectively read and write? Because when literacy is applied to new contexts—as it is all the time—it often retains the baggage of its traditional usage. Even in these new contexts, literacy is often used to describe a lack that we wish were filled, just as when we describe people who can’t read. Literacy is also often tied to effective reading and effective writing (though sometimes reading and writing are expanded to different forms of understanding and acting).

For example, I described myself as “literate” at the beginning of this piece because I saw through the Twitter spammer’s tricks. That’s because I was separating myself from the “illiterate” people who fall for his spam, and because I wanted to emphasize that communicating well on Twitter is tied both to reading and writing tweets effectively.

A quick Google search for literacy shows me various other ways that people use the word:

• Financial literacy: the ability to understand complex financial information, and the ability to act wisely on that financial know-how

• Information literacy: the ability to find the right information for a given task, and the ability to use that information in the best way (for an essay, work assignment, protest rally, or whatever)
• Media literacy: the ability to read or view the various tricks used by the media to subtly emphasize one point of view, and the ability to compose messages that use media trickery effectively for a given rhetorical situation

In all three of those examples of literacies, I imagine the term developed as people began to realize how illiterate their friends and colleagues seemed to be. (Perhaps most terminology begins this way: as a way for individuals to draw attention to their own strengths in comparison to a rabble of “those other people.” I feel cool when I catch a Twitter spammer. In that framework, financial literacy works as a helpful term because so many people seem to lack basic skills related to budgeting, managing credit cards, and paying off debt. To people who have financial literacy, those who lack it seem to be missing a set of skills so fundamental that to not have them is akin to a reading person’s feelings toward someone who can’t read. Along the same tack, information literacy works as a term because so many people seem to lack the basic skills necessary to find the information they need, especially in our increasingly information-centered world. And media literacy is a helpful term because so many people are duped by the political and social messages embedded in the news, movies, and music we consume.

Video Resources:

Video 1: License: Standard YouTube License Attribution: What is a Rhetorical Analysis? by Kyle Stedman.

Video 2: College Reading Strategies. Authored by: The Learning Center at the University of Hawaii Maui College. Located at: https://youtu.be/faZF9x4A2Vs. License: CC BY: Attribution

Video 3: Vocabulary Reading Strategies. Authored by: Lindsey Thompson. Located at: https://youtu.be/nfbY0EK7JEY. License: CC BY: Attribution

Video 4:  College Reading Strategies. Authored by: The Learning Center at the University of Hawaii Maui College. Located at: https://youtu.be/nfbY0EK7JEY. License: CC BY: Attribution

Video 5: Active Reading & Writing Teaching Example. Authored by: Karen Powers Liebhaber. Located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=Jx3__0bEFm4. License: Standard YouTube License

CC LICENSED CONTENT INCLUDED

Composing Ourselves and Our World,  Provided by: the authors. License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Reading Strategies. Authored by: Jolene Carr. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution

Reading on a Rock. Authored by: Spanginator. Located at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spanginator/3414054443/sizes/l. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

This chapter contains an excerpt of:

• Why Study Rhetoric? or, What Freestyle Rap Teaches Us about Writing:  by Kyle D. Stedman,Writing Commons, and is used under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license.
• Active Reading:  by Brogan Sullivan,Writing Commons, and is used under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license.
• What are New Literacies?:  by Kyle D. Stedman,Writing Commons, and is used under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license.