What is cyberliteracy? The term literacy is a highly contested one; I will provide a brief overview of this issue to illustrate how I am using the concept. Looking at this overview leads one to the logical conclusion that in the digital age, the concept of literacy must be reconfigured if it is to be useful for helping us understand communication in the future.
Kathleen Tyner, in Literacy in a Digital World (1998), provides a succinct overview of the literacy debate. She notes that in general, the term literacy is often equated with the ability to read and write. Before World War II, scholars wrote about “literacy as a tool for transforming higher psychological processes”.
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This ideological perspective—that being able to read and write was somehow transformative and brought people to a “higher level” of cognitive ability—valued certain types of ability over others; thus, scholars were making vast judgments about the superiority of one culture over another. Western cultures, living in the post-Gutenberg world of print, were, according to this way of thinking, superior to many traditional, indigenous cultures that communicated their history and cultural knowledge orally (through stories, poetry, song, and so on). As studies of human society became more culturally sensitive, this older view of literacy was hotly contested, and people realized that what “counts” as literacy in one culture may not be the same in another. In a more open view, all forms of discourse from all cultures are also forms of literacy.
And yet, popular understandings of literacy often hearken back to those more biased, simplistic definitions, valuing reading and print over any other form of communication. This view of literacy is what might be labeled as “performative”: that is, the ability to do something is what counts. We hear about literacy in this way almost every day when we watch the television news or read the paper and learn that people need to become more “computer literate” or “technology literate,” which, translated, usually means that these people need to learn how to use a computer and keyboard. Indeed, this view of literacy is so common that it leaves little room for what I am suggesting: a critical technological literacy, one that includes performance but also relies heavily on people’s ability to understand, criticize, and make judgments about a technology’s interactions with, and effects on, culture.
In addition to literacy as performance, most people understand literacy to mean “print,” and thus we have come to favor the book over the screen. As Welch, Tyner, and others have argued, print dominance has profound implications for higher education, because while students spend hours watching television and playing on the computer, their schoolwork still focuses on printed books.
One way to update this print-limited view of literacy to include electronic texts is to consider the work of Walter Ong. Ong’s notion of “secondary orality” helps describe the language we use on the Internet (email, Usenet news, the Web)—language that is a blend of written and spoken communication.
I would be remiss to discuss Ong’s work without noting its critics. Some people believe that Ong’s analysis of oral and print cultures is biased, suggesting the inevitability of print and the superiority of those who live in the Gutenberg world, and they often draw on the following passage to make their case: “Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing” (Ong 1988, 14–15). For this sort of thinking, Ong has taken his share of criticism, because these words may be interpreted to favor the white, European, post-Gutenberg world of print over numerous other oral traditions—traditions that are equally powerful and significant. He has, however, since modified his position.
Ong’s concept of secondary orality helps us consider cyberliteracy because it illustrates that electronic communication is in fact different from speech and different from print. A simple analysis of almost any email message illustrates this point. According to Ong, secondary orality combines features of print culture with features of oral culture. Like print, email is typed. It is fixed in a medium, for however long, and like a printed book can be distributed widely. Yet email texts sound more liked typed conversations than printed material. (Spelling and capitalization are often ignored, for example.)
Ong identifies nine features of oral discourse, noting in one example that oral style is “additive rather than subordinative” that is, each sentence builds on the previous one using certain parts of speech and rhythm. Others of Ong’s oral characteristics— aggregative rather than analytical; redundant; conservative; close to the human lifeworld; agonistically toned; empathetic and participatory; homeostatic; situational—are useful in seeing how the “written” e-texts of electronic discussions (like email) resemble both writing and speech.
This analysis helps us see that cyberliteracy is not purely a print literacy, nor is it purely an oral literacy. It is an electronic literacy— newly emerging in a new medium—that combines features of both print and the spoken word, and it does so in ways that change how we read, speak, think, and interact with others. Once we see that online texts are not exactly written or spoken, we begin to understand that cyberliteracy requires a special form of critical thinking. Communication in the online world is not quite like anything else. Written messages, such as letters (even when written on a computer), are usually created slowly and with reflection, allowing the writer to think and revise even as the document is chugging away at the printer. But electronic discourse encourages us to reply quickly, often in a more oral style: we blur the normally accepted distinctions (such as writing versus speaking) and conventions (such as punctuation and spelling). Normal rules about writing, editing, and revising a document do not make much sense in this environment. So it is not adequate simply to assume a performative literacy stance and think that if we teach people to use computers, they will become “literate.” Cyberliteracy (again noting Welch) is about consciousness. It is about taking a critical perspective on a technology that is radically
transforming the world.
From : Gurak, Laura J. Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet With Awareness. Yale University Press. 2001. (page : 12-16)
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