electro-textual

Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s (L&K) own chapter in their book “digital literacies” investigates the social networking site Facebook in the light of multiple literacies. Within that environment, literacies have a strong tendency to be “relational” rather than informational.

Hence the “super-poke” is all about connecting with a friend or colleague rather than transmitting any particular information. Membership in “groups” signals identity, but may not involve any actual communication or participation within the group.

Previous studies into social networking include: network theory, signaling theory, human geography theory, social contract theory, and the sociology of groups. Not much on literacies. Except Dan Perkel who examines MySpace usage from a “socio-technical” perspective. For him, “new representational forms” where people re-use many different kinds of media, signal “a deep shift” in the way we interact with each other.

L&K aim to bring their “sociocultural lens” into the investigation ..  as they highlight how people’s identities are constructed as members of Discourses “through the medium of encoded text”. Via boyd & Ellison, the authors note that social networking sites represent shift in way that online communications are organised: “around people not interests”. Online fora of the 80’s & 90’s tended to focus on issues or common topics .. now “the individual is at the center (sic) of their own community”.

So they examine Facebook in this light. Multiple literacies involve:

a) socially recognised ways of “generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content as members of Discourses through the medium of encoded tetxs.” Drawing on Scribner and Cole (‘81): “literacy as social practice”: ie:

• “socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks”
• pursuing “socially recognised goals” (collecting facebook friends, connecting with people)
• making use of “shared technology and knowledge system” (status updates, applications)

b) meaningful content

• “if there is no text there is no literacy” (Dang who thought up that idea.)
• loose approach to “meaningful content” .. “much weight on the complexity and richness of the relationship between (new) literacies and “ways of being together in the world”"

eg on a blog, meaning is intricately related to our perception of the writer’s identity.

• A text could be understood as expressing the writer’s desire to feel connected .. not as literal information.
• The meaning could be completely relational .. “expressing solidarity or affinity”

c) encoded texts

• meaning: texts freed from context and origin .. “frozen or captured” .. where the text can exist independently of its human creator.
• literacy goes beyond alphabetic symbols .. and can include eg photoshopping an image without text (!!)

d) participation in Discourses
The underlying meaning .. where people are “situated selves”, in socio-cultural context .. of life. Our social, physical, mental behaviours .. as we interact with “non-human elements” like tools, vehicles, buildings, institutions etc

“Meaning-making draws on knowledge of Discourses; that is, on insider perspectives, and meaning-making thus often goes beyond what is “literally” in the sign.” (p257) In this way, facebook represents a giant Discourse, a socio-cultural environment for insiders to connect.

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“Textual life of networks”
They go on to examine 2 people’s social networking practices, and the “textual life of networks”.

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Phew! it wasn’t such a struggle to make sense of the “theorisation” of Facebook, was it!
There is more to this chapter, but i’m exhausted and had to take a break.

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photo credit: John Swords

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