Just what the heck is new media and why does it matter?
Lankshear and Knobel
An Overview
In this reading, Lankshear and Knobel look at the many facets of “literacy”– the many definitions and the social implications of these definitions. Before the 1970s, literacy was associated with non-formal educational settings, and in relation to adult illiteracy. In the “Third World,” illiteracy was seen as indirectly correlated with economic development. During the 1970s, as education systems in the “First World” were pitted against other global education systems, attention was brought to the concept of literacy in formal educational settings. Paulo Freire was at the forefront of a radical education movement that sought to reveal how illiteracy was tied to unjust social processes, and how literacy was a means of becoming aware of these oppressive practices. He talks about “the praxis of reflection and action [as] the means for knowing the world more deeply and accurately”; one that “involved ‘testing’ to see how it would work in light of concepts and theories developed. They mention a three-dimensional model of literacy (operational, cultural and critical) that weave language, meaning and context (10).
Commentary
I have read bits from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and am deeply fascinated by his theories. Whereas literacy seemed to be a passive mode of receiving and distributing information prior to his ideas, the current change in the discourse surrounding literacy is immensely significant with respect to radical social change. It is so interesting how literacy is so tied into national agendas. In the 70’s the “literacy crisis”, became the catalyst for structural changes of the education system. As the US federal government became increasingly aware of its potential fragility as a global market power, it is then that the federal government began to pour money into “literacy basics” and “functional literacy” programs. I was particularly interested in their discussion of the progression of how educationists began to regard literacy as it began to play a more prominent role in formal education. On page 10, they talk about how educationists responded to the new pride of literacy’s place by adding more to their conceptions of literacy in order to “defend and preserve more expansive educational purposes and standards.”
Lister et al (pp 9-37)
An Overview
–investigates what “new media” means, identifies and distinguishes different kinds of new media, defines concepts specific to new media (including digitality, hypertexuality, dispersal and virtuality), and suggests the need for a “social constructivist” view of new media as opposed to one of “technological essentialism.” As a promising utility for change, new media is directly associated with deep, social, economic and political changes (Lister et al refers to a shift from modernity to post-modernity, an instensifying process of globalisation, a post-industrial information age, and decentralizing geo-political orders)
Commentary
In the beginning of the reading, Lister et al provided concise, but limited (for the sake of covering an expansive topic, I’m sure!) theoretical and historical frameworks that set “media” up against “new media.” From what I gathered, media is an established, “fully social” institution that is comprised of communication institutions like the press, cinema, broadcasting, etc. and the “cultural and material products” (10) of those institutions, while new media is nascent, less settled, less concretely identifiable –it is “a rapidly changing set…of experiments and…a complex set of interactions between new technological possibilities and established media forms” (10). In other words, it lies somewhere on the continuum between durable, long-established media forms and the rapid creation of future media, and this very indefinitive nature of new media lends it a seductive and powerful edge that implies a kind of social agency and promises to restructure many deeply entrenched social institutions–whether for a kind of net “good” or “bad” is fiercely debated. Lister et al provides the example of digitisation as an example of the intricacies of the value of new media. While digitisation allows for input and output of large amounts of data, it does not represent a “complete transcendence of the physical world” (Lister et al, 17). There will come a point when digitisation cannot be utilized physically anymore as the reality of scarcity exists and simply cannot be avoided. And yet, new media posseses an interactive opportunity for us to actually play a role in controlling or at least participating in media that may traditionally impeded us from contibuting.
