The social aspect(s) of literacy

Ordinarily, when we consider ‘literacy’, we think of an individual reader consuming the work of an individual writer. Our assumptions tend to be that literacy is an inherently cognitive activity. We assume that any ‘social’ aspects are bolt-ons: reading groups, social networks, poetry recitals, and so on. I would argue that literacy is inherently a social phenomenon. In fact, I’d argue that, in isolation, an individual cannot be literate at all:

“Even if we are alone, reading a book, the activity of reading — knowing which end to start at, whether to read a page left-to-right or right-to-left, top-down or bottom-up, and how to turn the pages, not to mention making sense of a language, a writing system, an authorial style, a genre forma (e.g. a dictionary vs. a novel) — depends on conducting the activity in a way that is culturally meaningful to us. Even if we are lost in the woods, with no material tools, trying to find our way or just make sense of the plants or stars, we are still engaged in making meanings with cultural tools such as language (names of flowers or constellations) or learned genres of visual images (flower drawings or star maps). We extend forms of activity that we have learned by previous social participation to our present lonely situation." (Lemke, 2002, p.36-37)

Literacy is very closely aligned with the knowledge and use of tools. I shall call this tool-knowledge. This first involved inscribing words or symbols upon rock or stone, then moved on to the use of quill/pen and ink, and finally the printing press. Literacy, however, also depends upon a different kind of knowledge. There has to be both something that is being communicated through the writing as well as an ability to use tools to do that communicating. I shall call this content-knowledge.

Literacy, then, involves both tool-knowledge and content-knowledge. Some would wish to equate literacy with these forms of knowledge. They would say that literacy is the sum total of the existing tool-knowledge and content-knowledge. However, this is problematic as it depends upon a static conception of knowledge. Both forms of knowledge change over time because of external factors out of our control such as societal norms and trends.

For hundreds of years tool-knowledge has been fairly static, centred around the printing press and the pen. Tool-knowledge has been taken for granted whilst we’ve come to accept that advances in content-knowledge affect literacy. We represent new ideas using existing tools and methods of expression. Things, however, have changed with new electronic forms of communication and, in particular, the dawn of the World Wide Web. Indeed, the author and educator George Siemens (2006) talks of knowledge having “broken away from its moorings, its shackles”.

There can never be a single literacy’ to rule them all. The commonsense ‘literacy’ to which we refer would be better described as traditional print literacy as it depends upon the technology of the printing press. As new tools for communication have been introduced — for example, email, social networking, video-sharing sites — so new forms of literacy are needed to understand them. For the sake of brevity and for us to be able to talk about these (what I term) ‘micro-literacies’ we tend to wrap them up into larger bundles. So when theorists talk about ‘New Literacies’ or when I refer to ‘Digital literacies’ that is, in effect, what we are talking about.

What underlies all of this is that being literate is not only an ongoing process, but necessarily a social activity. We use tools for the purpose of communicating with one another. This requires both tool-knowledge and content-knowledge. Crucially, both of these aspects of knowledge are in flux in the 21st century meaning that, “Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” (1970) ¹

¹. As far as I can tell, this was a quotation from psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy that Alvin Toffler used in Future Shock ↩