Literacy in a Culture of Delimitation and Provisionality

Abstract

The concept of literacy has traditionally referred to the reading and writing of printed texts but it has later been widened to include powerful new media. Literacy refers to the competency of citizens to deal with public media. This definition depends on a complex interrelationship of actors as readers and writers in a public sphere characterized by mass communication and recognized media. A prerequisite of this definition is a more or less contingent perspective on the terms reader, writer, and mass communication, which leads to an educationally motivated practice of literacy as critique, creativity, participation, self-control of media consumption, and so on. But the emergence of the Internet and its social media, as well as the ubiquity of mobile devices require a rethinking of the definitional elements and their interrelationship. In view of these new conditions we define media—in particular, mobile devices—as cultural resources within flexible contexts. Our focus is on the mobile complex that genera...