What does it mean to be literate?

Are you literate?

I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but maybe the question is better framed like this: “How illiterate are you?”

Technically, to be literate means you can simply read and write (that is, code and decode) in the representation system of your social group.  But even that simple definition assumes that there is a shared coding scheme.  If you’re a kid in the US in the early 21st century, that’s probably English; but it could also just as well be Spanish or Chinese. 

But it also has the sense of having knowledge or being competent in a specific area.  You can say, “he’s literate about wine,” “literate about netsuke,” or “literate about the Old Testament.”  A quick search reveals a whole host of literacies that are common these days:  media literacy, information literacy, financial, bible, multicultural, interactive, news, environmental...  on and on.  

So let me ask you again: Are you literate…. in all of these different *kinds* of literacies?  Which do you choose to be literate in?  

Let’s see: Which of these can you read & write? 

لا أتكلم العربية   

我不会汉语 

life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}    

Well, of course.  I don’t read those scripts either.  So the real idea of literacy is to be “literate with respect to a given major coding system in your social group.”    (Those unusual texts read:  “I don’t speak Arabic,” “I don’t speak Chinese,” and an APL implementation of the game of Life.) 

How about topic literacy?  Can you name the top wine producers in the Los Carneros region?   The three main kinds of netsuke?  The mother of Ishmael? 

Probably not.  But all this is not to prove that you’re illiterate, but just to make the point that we’re all illiterate with respect to a culture, a body of knowledge, or a technology we don’t understand.   To put it conversely, we’re only literate over a smallish amount of information.  There’s a lot out there, though, and it seems to me there’s actually a new kind of literacy that we need to understand. 

As I mentioned last week,  even if you know how to research something, you still need to know a little bit about the structure of how to search.  Searching for the answers to the questions above isn't that hard... but it requires that you know how to search.  

And this is that new kind of literacy I was talking about—knowing how-to-search and knowing-what-to-search. 

These days, with the flood of information we live with, it’s not enough just to be able to read and write whatever might fall into your hands.  Reading—really reading with insight and understanding—requires the ability to read-in-depth, and that means looking stuff up.  Writing—again, really writing with care and insight, means looking up more stuff or verifying that what you’re writing is accurate. 

People who are good at search and retrieval not only save time, but are far more likely to find (and create) higher quality, more credible, more useful content.  More importantly, they can ask questions that were impossible just a few years ago.  The biggest shift in the past few years has been the transformation of questions that were difficult to answer, but are essentially quick lookups.  We have changed the impossible question into the instant answer—but only if you know how.   

In a sense, that’s my mission—to help people become better searchers, beyond just the basic skill of knowing how to make Google dance.  My goal is to help people understand the larger issues at play here—how to be a literate person now, and now to be continually learning how to be literate as changes happen in the future.  This is the idea of *metaliteracy*—knowing how to be literate about your own literacy. 

Why should you care about meta-literacy?  Here’s a thing worth knowing.  The rate of introduction of new media, new genres, and new technology for reading & writing is pretty high now, and is continually increasing.  Think about it for a second:  How many of the media technologies that you use on a daily basis weren’t around 10 years ago?  YouTube, Google News, FaceBook, Google+, podcasting, screencasting, IM, iPads… these all really date to around 2004-2006.  But more are coming all the time.  Every week sees the introduction of some new kind of thing to read. 

More importantly, how many of the methods you use to read/write in these media existed a decade ago?  It’s now commonplace for a “swipe” gesture to do something on your phone or tablet.  Gestures have been around for decades in the research literature, but now it’s a interaction method that most *literate* people understand—it’s how you get to the next page. 

Metaliteracy skills are how you will navigate information in the future.  In essence, just to stay up with the stream of new media types, you’ll have to constantly learn how the new media works Consider: What’s the equivalent of “fast forward” in a video, a podcast, or a traditional book-bound codex? How do you refer to a particular passage of text in an electronic document?  The idea of “page number” falls apart on tablet computer with resizable fonts.  (Do we need to revert to a chapter & verse notation to identify text passages in our new texts?  Or will we just rely on reader’s ability to Control-F “find” the passage?)   

Literacy transcends just text.  Of course, it has for quite a while—we just tend to not talk about figures and diagrams that have always been part of the document.    Literacy transcends just medium.  The skills for reading newspapers are somewhat different than those needed for books, especially as books continue to evolve.  And this will be true for new media going forward.  Do you really know how to read and write social media? 

Another example: With an elegant first publication, PushPopPress just launched (as opposed to “published”) a new “full-length feature” digital book, “Our Choice.”  http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/  It’s a wonderfully genre-bending thing that has interactive graphics, embedded videos, and text that weaves through and with all the media.  “Reading” this kind of text is very different than traditional reading—you turn the “page” with a swipe gesture, but go “into subsections” with a pinch-expand gesture.  What was once a footnote is now an animation of how geothermal works, or an interactive visualization of wind energy resources.   Audio isn’t just layered on, it’s integral to the work. 

So.. What do you really need to know to be literate?  You need to understand at least that the technology—that is, the medium—is substantially different.  “Our Choice,” like other web-based software, can be modified each time you launch it.  I don’t know if they’ll do that or not, but it’s very possible, just as Amazon wiped-out copies of “1984” from Kindle owners who had purchased the text. When a question of whether or not the seller actually had copyright, Amazon just removed the app… um… the *text*… from the device.  Of course, it’s deeply ironic that it was “1984.”   And of course, the ways in which you read such a text is very different than the way you read the original “1984.”  Imagine a PushPopPress edition of “1984,” with links to all of the glosses, the movies, the interviews, the radio broadcasts, and learned commentary.  It’s not just text anymore, and it’s not a fixed corpus, and it’s not just a page-turner.  You need to change your understanding of documents and what it means to read one. 

Metaliteracy means that you know how to organize your own learning around literacy.  This will be vitally important as media kinds flourish, change, and pass away.  While being literate is something we take for granted, knowing how to drive your own literacy learning and understanding of what it means to BE literate will be essential.  If you don’t pay attention to your literacy, it would be easy for you to miss important elements of reading and writing in the new media. 

Do you agree?  What do YOU think it means to be literate now?

Discuss.