Daley- Expanding the Concept of Literacy

I found this article incredibly interesting. As a communications major, I know the importance of media literacy as well as linear literacy, but I never looked at the concept of literacy in quite such a large and open way. I definitely believe that people should have a better understanding of multimedia, and I believe that understanding should come much sooner than college. As children, we are exposed to so much media: television, computer, billboards, radio, the internet etc. and we don't possess the tools to properly decipher and understand all these "screen" that was are exposed to on a daily basis.

I think part of the reason multimedia is essentially looked down on when compared to text is because of the fact that it's everywhere. When print and text were first coming into existence, the only people who could actually use the products (i.e newspapers) were those who were rich and could afford an education. Therefore, text developed this stigma that only intellectual people read because it's such a sign of status. I think we still hold onto that, and because multimedia is a facet in everyone's everyday lives, the academic community is less likely to see it as a means for education, as something that people need to be taught literacy in.

I really liked the comparison to old Italian schools trying to teach in Latin. Multimedia is definitely the mean we are most fluent in, and in some ways I do believe that traditional classroom lecturing is becoming more and more out-of-date. Think of all of your professors who now utilize powerpoint, or history professors using documentaries and movies, or even just the students themselves bringing in their laptops to take notes on. Multimedia opens up new doors to use to learn and explore a new way of education. Youtube videos, google documents, things that we as students take for granted in our everyday leisure can be great tools to use towards education, but we need to be a culture that is completely literate in the usage of these tools.

I also enjoyed reading about multimedia as a more social form of interacting with each other. More times than not, the creation of multimedia is not a private process; it is used to create and share ideas which allows for serendipitous results that may otherwise have been smothered in a less social means of creation.

As a society so deeply "plugged in", it seems a little ridiculous to look down on multimedia because of its prevalence outside the classroom. If anything, that should make us want to take a closer look and explore what it would take for us to truly understand, to become literate, in a mean that is so deeply ingrained in our lives. As I said earlier, though, I think that process should start well before university education, and should begin to be taught as early as possible. Otherwise our children will remain illiterate in the language of multimedia, but will most definitely continue to consume it. There are many dangers that arise from situations like that, and it makes our children more vulnerable to media attacks (such as cartoon advertising during their favorite television shows). If we, as adults and the previous generation, are going to be creating media to target our children, we should at least provide them with the right tools to defend themselves.