Week 3 Journal: Networked Publics

The section that interested me most was Chapter 2: Media Convergence and Networked Participation. Collective intelligence is so easily facilitated by Internet-based platforms. When I think about it, I know so many people that create knowledge, culture, entertainment, etc. in publicly networked platforms. Both my younger brother and my boyfriend make digital music using Ableton software, sampling and mixing beats and melodies from YouTube; I’ve taken part in and benefitted from plenty of crowd-sourcing fundraisers such as Donors Choose or Giving Tuesday campaigns; students I’ve taught in the past have created and marketed apps… I don’t know if Google Drive is included in all of this – it seems like it should be – but I use it every single day in teaching: lesson planning, slide shows, etc. It’s incredible what we are now capable of creating collaboratively. To further illustrate, Varnelis (2008) points out that “networked distributors like Amazon.com increasingly make profits not from the short head— a small number of bestsellers— but from the long tail— a wide variety of niche products, each of which has relatively small circulation. Combined with the ability of digital communication to directly connect special-interest groups, these new distribution channels have enabled small producers and small audiences to find one another.” (p. 46) It occurs to me that this new phenomenon that Varnelis (2008) refers to as “networked public culture” has pervaded nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

But is it all necessarily beneficial? Sure, the collaboration and access has its advantages, but when viewing networked participation through the critical literacy lens, one must consider the implications in a more nuanced way. Public access to social media platforms drive the production of “click-bait” articles that lack substance, and in general it’s easier for erroneous or exaggerated news/information to circulate and gain momentum. And what is the underbelly of Amazon.com’s seemingly unbelievable customer service? In Kantor & Streitfeld’s New York Times article (2015), they chronicle Amazon.com’s system that is so efficient and miraculously fast, it can “get an Elsa doll that [a customer] could not find in all of New York City” and have “it delivered… in 23 minutes.” But what quality of life is robbed from Amazon’s workers in order to maintain this level of expediency, continuously meeting such insane demands? (This question is addressed – along with many other criticisms – in the New York Times piece.) And even with all of the public input that becomes involved in these networks, Varnelis (2008) reveals that “there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry… Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process.” (p. 48)

What fascinates me here is the contradicting interests and benefits of networked culture and consumer culture. We have become so accustomed to the convenience and facility of publicly networked platforms, and in so doing, don’t consider often enough what gets lost – or what we feel we need to consume – in the meantime.  More amateurs have access to contribute and create art, but artists that depend on copyright laws and protections in order to make a living have more of a challenge now. We can order just about anything we want from Internet-based stores, but there are still costs associated with this service, even if we don’t personally see or pay them.

References:

Kantor, J. & Streitfeld, D. (2015, August 15). Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

Varnelis, K., & Annenberg Center for Communication (University of Southern California). (2008). Networked publics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Defining and Evaluating New Literacies

I found Motoko Rich’s article “Literacy Debate: R U Really Reading?” provocative in more ways than one. Among the various perspectives and anecdotes presented, I kept coming back to the basic problem in this whole debate: the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes “reading” as well as the ambiguity surrounding evaluation of new literacies. According to Rich (2008), there has been a lot of handwringing about the decline in literacy levels, as measured by national reading tests, further exacerbated by findings that show a “slump in the proportion of adolescents who [say] they read for fun.” However, following these dismal statistics, the most important point – to me, at least – surfaced, almost as an afterthought: “(It was unclear whether they thought of what [students] did on the Internet as ‘reading.’) (Rich, 2008, emphasis mine) Well, if we’re not sure whether Internet-based activities are even considered “reading,” and we don’t have any way to evaluate the literacy skills of students who engage with Internet-based literacies, then can we really take reading test results seriously? Can we really know how to gauge literacy levels of our students?

The uncertainty about the definition of reading and literacy that Rich (2008) exposes is complicated by the fact that many authors and writers cling to the more traditional views of this subject. Rich (2008) lists the many purposes for which people read, ending with the comment that many people “read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.” She goes on to add, “It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize most. ‘Learning is not to be found on a printout,’ David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-wining biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. ‘It’s not on call or at the touch of a finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.’”

There’s a lot to unpack here. (What constitutes a “great book”? I wonder to myself, but that could take us in a whole different direction about the usefulness and/or exclusiveness of the traditional canon of literature.)

To the point of defining literacy practices, I’m left wondering: how can we so universally claim that “learning is acquired mainly from books,” not through apps “at the touch of the finger,” and not on printouts? (I find this last mention somewhat ironic as I sit here reading and learning from a printout of Rich’s New York Times article.) I learn from plenty of non-print sources, even though I grew up in a home rich with “traditional” literacy practices; my parents read to my siblings and me daily. At times my mother would bring New York Times articles to the dinner table to read and discuss with us. I still have hundreds of books in my home (even though there is no space for them in my NYC apartment…) because I love the aesthetic they add to my living environment, and I love the physical feel and smell of books when I read – characteristics that can’t be replicated on the Kindle or Nook or other tablets we use for reading. Still, I gain all my news almost exclusively from daily news podcasts such as DemocracyNow! or articles I read online on my iPhone.

More importantly, even though I had relatively no difficulty navigating the literacy demands I met in school, that does not mean that my experience can be viewed as universal. New literacies are here to stay, and certainly benefit plenty of young readers. Our students have found new ways to interact with and make meaning from texts, as Rich (2008) reveals through the example of the teen that reads and adds to stories through fanfiction.net. Rich (2008) further describes the experiences of young people that “crave interaction with fellow readers on the Internet.” She quotes a young man who astutely observes, “the Web is more about a conversation” while “books are more one-way.” In addition, Rich (2008) conveys that “experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information” because they can more efficiently skim through sources and locate what they need in a more self-directed way.

While strong opposing opinions continue to battle out definitions for reading and literacy, new approaches and practices are gaining traction. So how to we clear up the ambiguity about what constitutes reading? I believe we need to add to the traditional understanding of reading; it’s not just the linear experience of opening a book and reading it in a sustained way until it’s finished. Literacy is reading books plus interacting with texts and through Web-based programs, podcasts, social media posts, etc. Learning can and does occur on all these platforms.

Ultimately, it is clear to me that we have to expand our understanding of what young people need and learn from when it comes to developing literacy skills. And, we need to develop authentic ways to assess and evaluate the literacy skills that young people definitely are building as they navigate new territories of digital literacies. As we better understand how our young people learn in this new landscape, we can better meet their needs and keep them engaged in beneficial and edifying literacy activities.

Reference:

Rich, M. (2008). Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html

Week 1 Journal: New Literacies as a Social Practice

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

As a literacy teacher, I convey to my students that when we refer to "texts" in our classes, we refer to a broad range of modalities: film, podcasts, speeches, and articles in addition to the traditional novel and essay. However, this approach only takes into account definitions, leaving out the social/interactive component of literacy; as the prompt suggests, my definitions fall short of "what people do with texts, how they make sense of them..." (emphasis mine). I was struck by the assertion by Gillen and Barton on page 7 of "Digital Literacies" where they explore the implications of school literacy practices that rest on more antiquated approaches to literacy practices/experiences. While the experience of "reading" once meant a more solitary, singular, reflective activity, reading and interacting with information available through our many screens becomes a much more interactive -if disjointed - experience of hypertextuality. At the end of page 7, Gillen and Barton note that "if the school remains (obliged to) adhere to the characteristics of the former semiotic and social world, there will be an increasingly vast gap of practice, understanding, and disposition to knowledge." Immediately, my mind jumped to a picture of my commute to work on the subway; while listen to my beloved podcasts, I toggle through Facebook posts, New York Times articles, emails, and text messages. While I don't necessarily believe these practices are always the most efficient or effective ways for me to ingest or communicate information, they have become comfortable, if not habitual. My high school students have grown up surrounded by digital literacies that abound and evolve with unbelievable speed, and I know their interactions with the digital world mirror my own habits in many ways. And so, I think about the above-mentioned quote, and I wonder: what is my responsibility to my students to construct learning experiences that facilitate a more multi-modal approach to literacy practices - one that perhaps more authentically represents the way they use, approach and interact with text in their lives outside of the classroom? How does this question function next to the idea that we utilize "different literacies in different domains of life" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9)? 

When it comes to digital literacy, we find ourselves in a dynamic space. I was struck by how long the work of Lankshear & Knobel's research dates over the past decades, and how much their own approaches to this subject have shifted. Certainly some of their early claims remain true and relevant, even decades later when our access to and use of technology has transformed itself, and the way that we find, communicate, and connect information. The idea of "functional literacy" as this potential for some kind of equalizer is interesting to think about now, when social media and crowd-sourced news, information, and campaigns seem to shift the power dynamics further away still from a top-down, hierarchal model. But even as we curate our own sources of information, do we still live in a similar framework to the one Lankshear and Knobel described - one that is still "in fact functional for those who are materially advantaged by the status quo" (p. 16)? In her article "Beyond 'New' Literacies," Dana Wilber references this idea of "participatory cultures" (Jenkins, 2006, p. 3), noting that our access to and participation in literacies and social media demonstrates one of the most noticeable changes in "new" literacies. I want to believe that participatory cultures are necessarily more humane and democratic - reconciling many voices, priorities, narratives, and modalities. But is access and participation enough? Doesn't this all go back to how we read, understand, and interact with and make meaning of texts? 

References:

Gillen, J. and Barton, D. (2010). Digital Literacies. London Knowledge Lab Institute of Education.  Retrieved from http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/33471/1/DigitalLiteracies.pdf


Lankshear, C & Knobel, M. 2011. Literacies: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. New York. Peter Lang Publishing.

Wilber, D. (2010). Beyond “New” Literacies. Digital Culture and Education.  Retrieved from http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/dce_editorial_vol2_iss1_2010/