Digital literacy definition

'Digital literacies' are the constantly changing practices through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies. (Gillen & Barton 2009 :1)

...there is no deterministic relationship between technological innovations and people's practices and hence how digital literacies unfold. Many mistakes - at the design, commercial and indeed theoretical levels - are made through assuming that there is a straightforward relationship between what a new technology can do and how – or even whether – it will then be used. (Gillen & Barton 2009 :1)

References

Gillen, J. & Barton, D. (2009). Digital Literacies. A discussion document for TLRP-TEL (Teaching and Learning Research Programme - Technology Enhanced Learning) workshop on digital literacies. Lancaster University 12-13 March 2009. Retrieved 29 December 2009, from http://www.tlrp.org/tel/files/2009/02/digital-literacies-gillen-barton-2009.pdf

Variations on a meme

What's a meme? Is it the same as a viral? Yes, kind of, but no, not really strictly speaking ...

A meme is something in the air, that goes around, passed on from person to person. Sounds pretty viral-like so far.

However, it's not the same as a viral which is generally content (e.g. video) that self-propagates as it's forwarded from person to person (via email, Facebook etc.). I suppose you could argue that virals are a little passive - I find a funny video, I have a laugh, I pass it on to some friends who have a laugh at it too and pass it on in turn ad infintum (or usually until it comes back to me).

A meme involves more participation in the creation of new - in the sense of remixed, remade, adapted - content.

Here's an example: someone comes up with the idea of expressing song lyrics in the form of a PowerPoint-style pie chart graphic. The chart goes up - on Facebook, Flickr etc. - and in a short space of time there are hundreds - if not thousands - of riffs on the theme. If I meme (I think it's used as a verb) I'm creating my own take on an established convention - in this case re-articulating the lyrics of a song as a user-friendly graphic. There's stylistic play and parody aplenty here as memers (I think it can be used as an agent noun) simultaneously spoof pop lyrics and business-pitch presentation styles.

Where's it come from? Dunno ... but it looks like the thing you'd do if you were a student or bored office worker. Using MS Office and other software to have a laugh and take the piss out of both cheesy pop culture and naff business sales speils. The song chart meme in particular feels like the work of early 20 somethings to mid 30 somethings in its slacker, post The Office (UK and US), smirking, parodic aesthetic. I quite like it too ...

• Song Chart Meme
  http://flickr.com/photos/boyshapedbox/sets/72157603957925616/

Let's finish on a pretentious note: memes remind me of OULIPO, a group of mainly French writers drawn to the idea of la contrainte, constraint, as a means of generating new text. Meme-ing though is multimodal.

One problem with the term meme is that the Dawkins-derived metaphor doesn't assert the primacy of creativity; it is suggests a natural process of self-propagation without human agency.

Adding to Merchant's list - Ianto Ware on Keen and Emos

Another defining characteristic of digital literacy practices might be the publicisation of the private? The family photo album is going online; pictures of nights out are posted to Facebook (minutes later?); details of travel and purchases are twittered or posted to blogs etc..

Here's a bit from an article by Ianto Ware on this:

What the rise of Web 2.0 has done is simply to bring everyday, private sphere dialogue driven literacies into the public sphere in a very obvious way.

Ware, I. (2008). Andrew Keen Vs the Emos: Youth, Publishing, and Transliteracy. M/C Journal, 11: 4. Accessed from: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/41

Digital texts are like the Pompidou Centre

When I was a teenager, and desperately in love with the idea of living in Paris, I particularly liked le Centre Pompidou (aka Beaubourg).

Following up on my earlier comments on Merchant's definition of digital texts, I think they resemble Beaubourg's exoskeletal architecture - all the internal structural bits visible externally.

What I mean by that is that there's something about digital textuality that makes manifest some of the underlying features of all texts.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Notes on writing the future in the digital age

Merchant argues that the production and consumption of digital texts is very different to that of print-based texts. He lists the following characteristics:

1. A move from the fixed to the fluid: the text is no longer contained between the covers or by the limits of the page.
   
2. Texts become interwoven in more complex ways through the use of hyperlinks.
   
3. Texts can be easily revised, updated, added to and appended.
   
4. Genres borrow freely, hybridise and mutate.
   
5. Texts can become collaborative and multivocal, with replies, links, posted comments and borrowing - the roles of readers and writers overlap.
   
6. Reading and writing paths are often non-linear.
   
7. Texts become more densely multimodal (as multimedia allows for a rich interplay of modes).
   
8. The communicative space is shared and location diminishes in significance as the local fuses with the global.
   
9. The impression of co-presence and synchronous engagement increases.
   
10. Boundaries begin to blur (work/leisure; public/private; serious/frivolous).
    
    (Merchant 2007, 122)
    

I think I agree with Merchant on these characteristics but with a couple of biggish reservations:

Firstly, because digital texts can do all these things (e.g. enable collaborative authoring, revision, blur generic boundaries etc.) does it mean that this is how they are actually being used? In essence, is Merchant describing actual manifestations of digital texts or suggesting some of the directions digital texts might possibly take?

Secondly, I think that on a more sophisticated level, printed texts (books) have never been contained by their physical limitations and have always been interwoven and multivocal. Here's Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes ( I should probably cite Julia Kristeva too) on this:

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands... Its unity is variable and relative.
(Foucault 1974, 23)

[text is] ... woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?) antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.
(Barthes 1977, 160)

Do digital texts reveal more explictly the ways in which all texts are constructed? Is the really fantastic thing about them the ways they expose how all texts are produced?

References

Barthes, R. (1977) Image - Music - Text. London : Fontana.

Foucault, M. (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.

Merchant, G. (2007) Writing the future in the digital age. Literacy 41:3, 118–128