Digital Bibliography

Just finished reading Alex Reid’s blog, where he’s posted a response to a passage in the Horizon Report, produced by The New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE. I’m particularly interested in reflecting on Reid’s engagement with the Horizon Report’s use of the term literacy.

I sense that Reid is somewhat resistant to the grafting a one term, literacy, with its history as a socially valorized term in particular contexts, onto a much more contemporary—and only selectively related—digital context. Literacy originally emerged as a key cultural term in reference to print texts (most often implying some relationship to reading and writing books and letters). I won’t deny that there are some pretty clear analogs between the two contexts (printed texts vs. digital texts). And I share Reid’s skepticism about the (what I would characterize as) too-easy appropriation of the culturally-loaded term into what often seem to be overt rhetorical strategies for legitimizing digital media studies. Here are three quotes from Reid’s post:

It is increasingly difficult to imagine arguing that college students will not be using digital media as students, professionals, and citizens for many purposes that will partly supplant as well as extend the way prior generations used books, paper, pens, typewriters, libraries, televisions, newspapers, lecture halls, and even higher education itself. As an industry, as institutions, and as faculty we remain ill-prepared to meet these changing conditions.

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