Digital Literacy

"To be literate is not just to be able to read and write, literally, but to be able to traffic the many genres that surround us:" - David Levy, Scrolling Forward

"But this is the basic misunderstanding: the fundamental issues are not technical. To understand this is basically a matter of media consciousness and not technical knowledge" - Ted Nelson Computer Lib/Dream Machines

This course will investigate how the digital challenges our perceptions of what we have come to call literacy (and thus, composition). Is literacy a relevant term for digital production, or do we need a new term to describe the process of acquiring and producing knowledge? If literacy includes what Jack Goody describes as the ability to create referentiality, categorization, and definition (ideas which dominate composition studies and its textbooks), what happens to these kinds of practices when we compose digital texts or texts clearly shaped by the emergence of a digital apparatus? We will read texts which narrate the history of literacy studies, demonstrate literacy practices, and challenge conventional understandings of literacy in terms of digital culture. Readings will either directly reflect what we might label digital literacy – the ability to produce knowledge within digital environments - or, because of their focus and purpose, will be generalizeable to digital culture and writing. Therefore, not all readings will be obvious digital texts, but many of their theoretical assumptions can be understood as the result of digital culture.

The question of literacy – what it means to produce and understand information – is not an easy question to approach. Yet, its treatment in English Studies has been that of accepted assumptions regarding clarity, coherence, and understandability. This course asks you to consider how the digital challenges these tropes through a variety of complex ways. In this sense, the digital will be considered to be an implicit and explicit force shaping writing and knowledge. A number of the texts chosen for our readings will be performative; that is, they will be more than explication of a theory or concept. Most of the texts will perform the theories they express interest in.

Our readings, at first glance, may not entirely feel “traditional” either. The various approaches to knowledge we will encounter via visuality, art, music, and celebrity culture attempt to view literacy through unfamiliar eyes. It is no accident that these texts may seem out of place in an English graduate course; English Studies often views literacy as a familiar concept, a natural assumption regarding our ability to understand information.

My hope is that we will use the performative nature of digital culture to rethink the concept and overall project associated with literacy acquisition. For your major projects, I encourage you to explore rhetoric and discourse in broad ways, to search out theories and develop your own theories as to why basic assumptions associated with literacy - naming, definition, representation, categorization - are being challenged by an emerging and increasingly dominant digital culture.