Literacies and Media Culture

Abstract

The ‘mediatization’ or ‘digitalization’ of culture through rapid technological advances in media communications has had and will continue to have a profound impact on what it means to live, to work, and to learn in a culture of accelerated change. Communication and meaning-making-modes of individual and collective expression, creativity, representation are at the heart of culture. When changes occur to technologies of meaning-making, social tensions and anxieties escalate around issues of ownership, influence and effect, infrastructure and content, and access and opportunity. Much of this tension and anxiety can be traced to commonly cited, strongly held (yet highly debatable) beliefs about the relationship of literacy, as its pertains to a specific medium or media, to a plethora of ‘social goods’ including democratic participation, morality, health, and economic well-being. Here, literacy is defined as both a knowledge relationship and a set of cultural practices which enables one to manipulate communications media for a variety of meaning-making purposes. In this sense, then, literacy is both relational and contextual. Literacy is a central project of education. In these times of unprecedented change, it is important to ask of education its place in addressing the numerous and profound implications for (changes in) literacy in the context of contemporary culture