Jeff on Selber

As Casey notes (http://cabooyah.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) none of the literacies Stuart Selber's Multiliteracies for a Digital Age describes are at all new. Indeed, we have been working on Critical Literacy and Rhetorical Literacy (goodly or badly) since reading and writing have begun and have been teaching (goodly or badly) since education began. Even Functional Literacy, which would appear to be conditioned upon the implementation of technology, is ancient; it has only been ignored because, previous to digital technology, the functional literacy has been assumed. In other words, our culture is so (im)(com)licit in the functional literacy of the book form that is has never been questioned.

If you think about it, though, we have always had to teach functional literacy. Our parents (we hope), by reading to us or reading themselves, have modeled the linear path it is presumed one must make through a book. We were taught the function of a table of contents, of an index, of a lexicon. Others before us had to be taught to use the pencil, the pen, wood-based paper, the typewriter, even the book before it was the predominate medium by which to transcribe knowledge.

All Selber does, really, is bring these literacies to bear on a new technology, a new form of reading/writing. He asserts that, in fact, these literacies do exist in our relationship to digital technology and must be recognized if we are to consume digital technology effectively like we do older forms of technology.

More interesting to me is that digital technology brings both critical literacy and rhetorical literacy to bear on those older forms of technology, particularly on their function. By questioning the materiality of digital technology, scholars have been able to turn back the page and inquire about the critical and rhetorical implications of the book's materiality. By questioning the non-linearity of digital technology, we can (newly) inquire about the linearity of books (or whether their linearity is sacrosanct). By examining the literacy patterns of people using digital technology, we can question whether people's literacy of older technologies actually work the way we have presumed.








Seeing the Man -- Stuart Selber
(http://www.wide.msu.edu/conference/wide_conference_speakers/)