Extending the Discussion – Week 11 New Literacies
Technology has shaped and reshaped the way people interact with and create information. Up until the late 1990s, information was gate-kept by publishers. People had to be bona fide experts who paid their dues in the formal education process. Scholars published works on politics, health, science, etc. Conspiracy theories were relegated to cheap tabloids found at check out counters. There was limited information available, as the experts could only supply so much information at one time. But the internet changed that (Leu et al., 2012). Especially in the wake of Web 2.0 technologies of the early 2000s and 2010s – blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter – changed the ways users created and interacted with content. Anyone could post anything. In 2008, I was a newly minted college instructor and would warn my students not to use Wikipedia. I’d set up assignments where I would have them look up things on Wikipedia and then edit the pages to feature outlandish nonsense to prove it couldn’t be trusted – because what would twinklestar099 know about literature of the Cold War that Richard Slotkin didn’t know better? We were wary of authority of sources in the early days of Web 2.0 because those of us teaching and working had grown up with card catalogues and library collections that could only be used on campus, even if the catalogue was now digitized on the computer. There were processes in place to make sure disseminated information was as accurate and well composed as was possible (most of the time).
Teaching literacy in writing classes used to be the difference between an encyclopedia, a trade journal, a scholarly peer-reviewed source, and the difference between .com and .edu sources. But once Web 2.0 emerged – more was demanded. Yi (2021) get at this in his definition of AI competency. As the technologies we have become more complex, so do the means of critical thinking and reflection of the tool. And then to add to that, people have to be cognizant of how the information they find and the tools they use to find it shape them and their possible futures. We have to simultaneously evaluate the material we get, plus the source of the material, and it’s future effect on us, our culture, and our opportunities (Leander et al, 2020; Yi, 2021). Generative AI has the capacity to shape our world more than any Wikipedia article ever did. At some point, the AI is going to become indistinguishable from reality and people are going to have to be critical observers and critical participants in their world. Leu et al. (2012) articulated that the youth will drive the change and the way language happens. But in the past, language change and social change were driven by youth in a social context where fact checking was always going to be possible; I’m not sure that with AI that will be the same. Not to mention that algorithms shape what we see online and there is not a single Internet or ChatGPT or TikTok we encounter (Leander et al, 2020). Every single thing we do online is shaped by our specific interactions with the Internet. Knobel et al. (2014) discuss the ways people work to collaborate to create knowledge, and de-centralize knowledge making, but don’t talk about the pitfalls. We’re living them in 2023. Anyone can post anything online. People give credibility to the person with the camera or the blog post, I think, because we’re still stuck with the old gate-keeping mentality of we can trust published things because their published. Being published used to mean an entire vetting process of credentials, veracity of claims, research validation – now anyone with a smartphone and opinion can post anything. We have witnessed what happens when arm chair experts dominate the discourse an so many important topics with a sharp intensity in this last five years, especially. And if people do not learn to approach digital texts, digital searches, and the technologies that facilitate our access to that information with a critical eye – especially with all generative AI can do – there are problems on the horizon we cannot even articulate today.
References:
Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2014). Studying new literacies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(9), 1-5.
Leu, D. J., & Forzani, E. (2012). New literacies in a Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, …∞ world. Research in the Schools, 19(1), 75-81.
Leander, K. M., & Burriss, S. K. (2020). Critical literacy for a posthuman world: When people read, and become, with machines. British Journal of Educational Technology, 51(4), 1262-1276.
Yi, Y. (2021). Establishing the concept of AI literacy: Focusing on competence and purpose. JAHR, 12(2), 353-368. https://doi.org/10.21860/j.12.2.8
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