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February 02, 2005
a post-what WHAT?
brooks, nichols, & priebe characterize their students responses to using blogs in a variety of ways to extend classroom work into other writing opportunities as follows:
the generally positive response to weblogging that emerges despite these differences suggests that as the genres and motives for weblogging are understood more clearly, the practices has sufficient cultural and pedagogical appeal to encourage and motivate student writing even in a post-literate age.
i hit the end of that paragraph like the titanic on that infamous iceberg. a post-literate what? a post-what age? i'm beyond confused, but i think first that maybe i'm missing something; maybe this is one of those terms that seems transparent but in usage has come to masquerade as something else.
so i "google" "post-literate age,"--an activity, i hardly think i need to add, that involves a several-tiered process of textual negotiation requiring a great deal of print literacy (what i assume they're referring to) in addition to what others variously call "computer literacy" or "technology literacy"--and found two dominant explanations of the term. one distinguishes between a "scientific" & literal conception of language and a more poetic, fluid conception, applying the term "post-literate" to the latter; the other, which i'm assuming is what brooks, nichols, and preibe had in mind, can be exemplified by the following explanation in a 1997 essay by brian rotman:
We are at a juncture when computer technology, a medium as awesomely powerful, transformative, delimiting and invasive as writing once was, is changing the world forever; we've reached a point when 'writing', as the linguist Roy Harris put it, has 'dwindled to microchip proportions' [The Origin of Writing: ]. We are living in momentous times: the inventions spawned by computing and the digital logic that goes with it are gobbling, at an accelerating pace, ever larger chunks of human culture and rendering obsolete practices that have lasted for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. As the medium of writing displaced orality and changed forever how humans encounter, respond and imagine each other, so the medium of computing, just as totally and relentlessly, is displacing literacy.
say what? i'm no less confused. everything i do with relation to computers is textual, literate, screen-print (most of it easily transferable to print-out). my geeky (no offense, anyone) coder/programmer friends spend all day writing--sometimes documentation in sentence form, sometimes memos and briefs in paragraphs, sometimes, yes, code, in a different language than the one i'm using now, but it's still a writen language system--it's still writing. it still requires literacy, where literacy = the ability to decode/make meaning from (theoretically definable as two very different things, i know, but i'm leaving that be for now) a visual collection of symbols representing word-based information.
how can that possibly be post-literate? when has any civilization ever in the history of the world made literate practices--reading, writing, whether on paper or on screen, usually both--more fundamental to its functionality? if anything, i'd call us uberliterate--but "post"? or is there something about what these writers mean by "computing" that's eluding me completely here? or is there some theoretical association with "post" not actually meaning "after b/c instead of" that i'm missing?
i've spent long enough looking for the context of the harris quote rotman's working with; i don't expect 1997 = 2005; i'm out of disclaimers. maybe instead of missing something i'm missing a lot of things. but... post-literate?
(x-posted to 711)
Posted by ttobryan at February 2, 2005 01:35 PM