Doing Digital Being Digital - CRIT

Perhaps people's notions of where the boundaries of literacy lie are to do with the fact that digital literacies are so social. Lewis and Fabos's 14 year old informant said to them:

Everybody dores it. It's like I've grown up on it. It's like how you felt about stuff when you were growing up.

Michele said last week that we could perhaps refer not to Information Communication Technologies, (ICT) but to Information, Relationship and Communication Technologies (IRCT). My preference is for Communication, Relationship and Information Technologies, because we can call it CRIT, or maybe even Social Communication, Relationship Information Technologies (SCRIT). Or maybe ...

Well I think that because we are so busy using our digital tools in our lives to do things all the time, we move from one digital item in careful, discriminating and blended ways all the time. It is about DOING, not just reading or writing. We DO notice when we move from one tool to another; we choose carefully whether to text, to talk, to Instant Message, to blog or to write an article on our word processors. But we move in free flow from one area to another; our i-pods are commodity fetishes; so artifacts, the tools we use are fashion items , are clothing. In this way we blur the boundaries between jewellery and technology. So it is easy, I think, for resaerchers to start thinking about the body as text, fashion as text.



Our mobile phones allow us to do particular identity performances; our blogs allow us to play with ideas to do with work, to do with family and to bring in images from our phones or Flickr sites. We customise our blogs and personal sites, like we decorate and furnish our home spaces and teenage bedroom walls. It becomes easy for me to think about these kinds of spaces as texts from which to read off messages about identity. Our activities are facilitated by our use of materials in a blended way. And so I think it is becoming tempting to broaden our notions of literacy.

Those who are insiders of the technology seem to make the choices of what technology to use and when, with ease ... but those who don't?

We need to teach them. It is about the right technology in the right context; not just the right language in the right context. Because medium, message and mode are so close, we need incorporate medium and modality because they partly constitute the message and impact on meaning.

So I argue for a broad notion of what literacy is about. And I want to be a semiotician.

(Well, it is easier than being an acrobat in Picadilly Circus, which is what I wanted to be when I was seven.)