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The Challenge of Postdigital Literacy: Extending Multimodality and Social Semiotics for a New Age

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Abstract

Research in this journal has argued the importance of developing new understandings of literacy and education in the face of rapid and widespread (post)digital reconfigurations in how we learn, communicate, and even exist as embodied ecological beings. Alongside and predating interest in the postdigital, multimodality research developed significant theory and methods for articulating the implications of emerging digital media, showing the need for a ‘multiliteracies’ approach in education. Still, we argue that frameworks in multimodality remain, in notable ways, structural (non-phenomenological) and text-centered, as stemming primarily from the tradition of social semiotics. In response to the limitations of multimodality frameworks in the face of postdigital challenges to critical media literacy (Jandrić 2019), we propose an integrative conceptual framework for understanding literacy as embodied modeling competency (Campbell et al. 2021; Olteanu 2021). With this framework, we make no strong distinctions between digital and non-digital experience, arguing that all meaning-making involves responding to primarily embodied/environmental affordances and constraints. This approach orients literacy away from enduring assumptions of monomodality that are deeply entrenched in modern state-run education and away from text- and language-centric frameworks generally. We propose that this enriched postdigital literacy framework can overcome several limitations of multimodality theory, particularly in terms of accounting, holistically for postdigital learning experiences, and educational designs that openly collapse distinctions and discontinuities between embodied interactions with physical objects in environments with interactions in digitally mediated spaces.

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  1. Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Education Building 8630, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Cary Campbell

  2. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Alin Olteanu

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Campbell, C., Olteanu, A. The Challenge of Postdigital Literacy: Extending Multimodality and Social Semiotics for a New Age. Postdigit Sci Educ 6, 572–594 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00414-8

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