Postliteracy: a view from Leiden

Posted on | September 18, 2009 | 6 Comments

Janneke Adema, of Leiden University, is researching Open Access Academic Publishing for the OAPEN Project, and she has written a lengthy post about the concept of post-literacy. She summarizes a number of themes around the topic, and her post will interest all of those who joined in the spirited debate that took place across this blog and a number of others a year or so ago (you will find many of the relevant links brought together in my post Debating Literacy: pulling some threads together).

Jenneke’s post starts more or less where my original piece on this debate began too: with Doug Johnson’s insightful musings on Libraries for a Postliterate Society. She is kind enough also to replay some of my own thinking on the subject.

I was interested, though, to read a couple of definitions of post-literacy that she picked up on. The first is taken from Wikipedia, which defines (as of the point at which this and Janneke’s posts were written) post-literate society as a stage:

…wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary….

We can discount this one immediately, since it is offered in the context of a ‘hypothetical society’ that one might find in a science-fiction tale. Phew!

Her second definition is more worthy of consideration, coming from postliteracy.org:

Postliteracy.org is a response to the relationship that people in the twenty-first century have to literacy and shifting modes of communication. The Web has evolved from a text-based technology to one focused on graphic display and visual layout. Multimedia content largely privileges visual over verbal content.

I have some difficulty with this definition. The Web has undoubtedly evolved from a text-based medium to one that is highly graphical and visual, but it is debatable, at the very least, whether the focus has really shifted from one to the other. I would contend that the focus, rather than having shifted, has been extended a long way beyond the bounds of textual expression to include all those other modes of expression or communication.

Is it not the case that text is still critically important on the Web, but that there are now very many other modes of expression/communication either complementing the text or, indeed, vying with the text for our comprehension and interpretation? That the graphical and the visual are hugely significant on the Web is merely to state the obvious, but that the Web is also now, I believe, our key source and repository for text-based expression and communication, already replacing the print media and soon, probably, to begin to replace the book in its current form too, is equally to state the obvious.

I’m trying to split a fine point here, but it is an important one, I think.

And then of course, there is the further, and moot, question of how post-literacy and digital literacy might be related to each other

Technorati Tags: Janneke Adema, leiden university, postliteracy, digital literacy

Category: books, images, knowledge, literacy, media, philosophy

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6 Responses to “Postliteracy: a view from Leiden”

Twitter Trackbacks for Postliteracy: a view from Leiden : John Connell: The Blog [johnconnell.co.uk] on Topsy.com
September 18th, 2009 @ 5:39 pm

[...] Postliteracy: a view from Leiden : John Connell: The Blog http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=2251 – view page – cached Janneke Adema, of Leiden University, is researching Open Access Academic Publishing for the OAPEN Project, and she has written a lengthy post about the concept of post-literacy. She summarizes a number of themes around the topic, and her post will interest all of those who joined in the spirited debate that took place across this blog and a number of others a year or so ago (you will find many of the relevant links brought together in my post Debating Literacy: pulling some threads together). — From the page [...]
Bill Boyd
September 20th, 2009 @ 4:29 pm

Interesting discussion as usual John. I’m inclined to believe, as Adema seems to suggest, that the focus has shifted from text towards the visual or graphic, or as someone recently described it, “we used to use pictures to illustrate our texts, now we are more likely to use text to explain our pictures”. On your point that the internet is now our main source of “text-based” information I agree with you entirely, but critically the way we read it is different. We don’t often or always read complete pages, we don’t read them in any particular order, and we certainly don’t always read them from top to bottom and left to right. Teachers used to teach the skills of skimming and scanning explicity. I wonder whether it is now more important that they do this or whether the nature of “reading” web pages makes these skills redundant?
mhairi mcalpine
September 25th, 2009 @ 11:42 pm

Interesting post.

Maybe one way of relating post literacy and digital literacy is to look at literacy as a property not of a person but of a social environment. That literacy is the medium through which we gain access to community knowledge.

In what would be commonly termed a “pre-literate” society, there is usually an oral tradition, where people pass down stories from generation to generation. Literacy is the knowledge of references and the background as well as the substance of stories so that meaning can be made and community knowledge can be established.

In a literate society, knowledge is codified through text – information can be obtained so long as you can gain access to it and can decode it according to conventions, not only reading in a functional sense. Literacy is skills that give access to community knowledge encoded according to shared conventions.

In a post literate society, knowledge is all encompassing and accessible through technological tools which can present it in a variety of ways. Literacy is the ability to work the tools needed to present community knowledge in a manner which can be decoded by the individual.

Digital literacy is to a post literate society what reading is to a literate society and story telling is to a pre-literate society.

At one level its a continuum, but at another there are fundamental paradigm shifts. once society is comfortable with the transition from pre-literate to literate society, there is a relaxing of the pre-literate demands for shared community knowledge – which at one level was what the Culture Wars of the 80s were about, that as Western societies reached near 100% literacy, pre-literate skills were held in lower esteem.

In the transition from a literate to a post-literate society, conventions that were essential for passing on codified knowledge become less critical as information can be communicated and processed in a variety of ways.

Literacy has always been thought of as something that is possessed, but perhaps the form in which it is possessed is contexual – that literacy in a “post-literacy” society is qualitatively different – and that we need a new word that defines the 4Rs as a past indicator of literacy and that digital literacy is actually our new benchmark.

PS Great keynote at the e-assessment Scotland conference
John Connell
September 26th, 2009 @ 8:31 am

Thank you, Mhairi, for a comment that is worthy of a few re-readings. I like the notion of ‘literacy as a property not of a person but of a social environment’, as something that gives us access to community knowledge. A lot to think about here.

I thoroughly enjoyed your own contribution – the work you’re doing could be very important in guiding assessment into the future!
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