first thoughts

What comes up for me when I think about digital technology is the difference between what it means to have skills with digital navigation and what it means to be digitally literate.

In my view, digital literacy should mean more than the ability to use the technology; it should mean the ability to understand the environments well enough to invent and maintain them.  Most "digital natives" (like my children) can find their way around the technology, but that doesn't mean they can design or engineer it or fix it when it breaks (which is not the same as finding their way around in it when they are lost--which they can do).

It's the difference between knowing how to drive a car or how to build a car.  Literacy is about invention, or at least construction.  It isn't just about use.  Another way I look at this is that having speech, or the ability to verbally employ the language, might enable one to participate in a conversation, but it does not make one an effective contributor to it.

Literacy is emancipatory; it liberates us to rise up with language and ask for things in ways that might actually enable us to get them.  To me, literacy implies analysis--the ability to encode and decode strategically--in my mind, the term "literacy" shouldn't be bandied about lightly or it will  come to mean too many different things.  A word that means too many things loses its power.

In his article "The Information Implosion" (from the book Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987), Wes Jackson foretells the being in and the coming of an age where we are so inundated with "information" that we lose track of important cultural knowledge--like the information our grandparents had in order to survive harsh winters or handle medical emergencies miles from hospitals or EMS responders.  Jackson argues that much of this information we've lost, and are losing, is life-saving information.  Gregory Bateson might say (if he were still living) that we have traded valuable cultural "information" (any difference that makes a difference) for noise.  In fact, Bateson's definition of information probably provides the best basis for a definition of literacy--the ability to distinguish the difference between information and noise.

I think the abundance of noise masquerading as information make us vulnerable to a dark age.  I also fear that if most of the information we do have is digitally stored (and not stored in the stories of our elders or on the pages of shelved volumes), then when the lights go out or the grid goes down (as they can and will do), we have no way of knowing anything.  Books can be read by daylight or by tallow light.  Digital material can only be accessed when layers of expensive and resource heavy technologies function in tandem (sub-stations, electric wires, batteries, satellites, militaries, governments, banks).

This precarious web of inter-dependencies is perhaps fine during open and affluent times, and it's fine if you are one of the select or privileged few deemed worthy of cultural protection and preservation, but in truly dire economic, social, political and/or environmental circumstances, such reliance is not only not practical, it is perhaps impossible.

...And while I appreciate what digital technology (social networking) has done and continues to do for the de-centralized organization of powerful social/political movements across the globe, I think we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that underneath the success of these movements of connection is literacy of the alphabetic ilk: the ability to pause and to read and to plan and to reach out to others through scripted strategic appeals that can, if needs dictate, be written on bark in charcoal and delivered with equally focused intention to a smaller, more proximal community.

I guess my concern is this: the more distance between a people and their tools for communication (be that financial, intellectual, social or environmental distance) the more vulnerable they (we) are to exclusion and oppression.  Because of the number of mediators and middle men, relay switches and widget connections, if literacy becomes too dependent on digital technology for its expression, more people than ever before will be kept in the dark.

I guess what it comes down to is this:  Who is whose tool?  Are we in danger (as Neil Postman quoting Thoreau suggested we might be) of being tools of our tools? Whose in charge?  This is a question about addiction as compared to use--  So I guess to wrap this up for today: the question is not,  Is technology is a burden or a blessing?  The question is, Who is in charge of the tool? If the users are not in charge then it is an addiction and its a burden.

My prediction is that in American culture digital technology will play out as more of a burden because at present it seems to be more of an addiction than an enjoyment.  Just sayin.........