William's Shimmering Literacies and the last chapters of Brandt's Literacy and Learning focus on a topic which is becoming more and more central in present-day discussions on literacy: the shift of attention from reading to writing.
Brandt explains how the commodification of knowledge has become central to Western market economy: from advertising to user's handbooks to insurance contracts, making contents available to consumers through writing is the sine qua non of a literate market addressed to a largely literate public. Historically, the use of writing developed around the needs of precise sponsors: either the merchant keeping accounts, or the king founding the writers, or the "recent" and disruptive mass-circulation press selling to a growing (and grown) audience. Likewise, nowadays writing is considerably employed (and sponsored) by economic and political activities: the complexification, fragmentation, and burocratization of our societies require an ongoing production of written material, functional to the interaction of the different components of the societies themselves. Through writing, the knowledge which fosters economic, politic, and social changes has been, and is being digested and diffused largely according to the needs of the structures which can benefit from its production: public/private structures which can afford the costs of financing mass written knowledge, or/and structures which have a gain from financing it. In a continuum which links economy to people, literate "labor"’s skills explain and/or sell products; complement the activity of public services; respond to the needs of a mass reading society.
Reading has become instrumental to writing, if such a thing does really make sense (and presently it does). Remunerative writing is basically a working task, to be complied in a more or less programmed way; it (and often its teaching) is promoted and paid because the reading of its content generates gain.
Simultaneously, writing and reading are sponsored by the expanded literate drive of our societies. Consumers of products with user's handbooks, policy holders, book- and magazine-buyers, are the literate us, unemployed, employed, students, workers, immigrants, children, young, adults, elders, everybody. As a largely literate society, we have been mostly, but not only, consumers of/through literate objects. Some things are worth to be said about the different value that writing and reading assume for/are credited by us, according to the moment and time in which we position ourselves in the literate continuum. In her study, Brandt observes that traditionally (that is, in Western XX century, on a mass scale) writing as a skill is taught in dependence to reading (ie.: comprehension tasks at school), and to practical needs, and reading is associated with learning, instruction, top-bottom education; besides that, writing is commonly developed as a private instrument of resistance/vent/self-discovery. But, as Williams's study (and our daily actions) adds, the diffusion of internet and the transformation of mass communication technologies have "massified" other forms of writing use: now, more and more people write to be read, and read to respond and produce more writing.
In her introduction, Williams makes an interesting and useful contextualization of mass popular culture in respect to the transformation of Western societies from largely oral to largely literate ones. Oversimplifying, our popular mass culture is one of many possible developments of a local oral culture -the globalized and commodified one. What is "mass" and "popular" of it, is what is presently shared by people. On this shared culture, as they would do in/with an oral culture, people elaborate and share meaning. In this scenario, the presence of literacy and internet has many consequences: they expand the reach and complexity of voices which participate to a culture which is written/recorded for its means, oral for its modes, and global (as opposed to local and more than national) for its numbers. What about its contents?
I don't have the competence to address the topic of how oral and local cultures helped people to adapt in Western oral societies until the XIX century. As for now, I can refer at least to William's study (but also to my experiences) to say how mass popular culture participates in our lives. Correctly, Williams observes that popular mass culture (namely TV, cinema, music, books, multimedia products) is an important "component" of our leisure time, and it excites many of our passions (he talks about emotions, see chap. 2). Indeed, as an oral culture, mass popular culture is in constant dialogue with our multiple but affine identities, which extract and generate sense from and for it. Not only has internet fostered/amplified the reach of the participants to sharing and sense making-processes, through writing; internet has also made evident a consequence of the diffusion of literacy: "literate" practices of sharing inherited from oral behaviors (indeed natural to humankind) have paralleled "literate" development of the economic and political sphere. Unsurprisingly, it is in these contexts that writing and reading are used to negotiate meanings, acting as strategies of social adaptation through sense-making and consequent decision-making practices.
The questions of high and low culture, academicism and popular mass culture, teaching and self-teaching depend heavily on how the sponsors of literacy envisage the contents of writing and reading in our Western societies. Which sponsor promotes which literacy, in our social continuum(s)? Williams often refers to the disdainful attitude of teachers or professors (of "high culture partisans" in general) in respect to part of popular mass culture. And he rightly points to some obvious characteristic of p.m.c that make it successful (read: appealing or easily-identifiable-with) for the "mass:" 1) the stimulation of involving and strong emotions; 2) its participativeness, which extends the emotions into their communication, generating first-person sense-making, and giving the possibility of "empathetic" sharing. As the "literate" use of internet by younger generations confirms, skills like writing&reading are employed with passion and "success" when used in a situation that is in some way relevant to a person. Nihil novi. The challenge of schools and educators, if they are so concerned with low culture, is to make high culture available to students in ways that allow for personal identification or emotion.
That the academic/literate/educational activities favor rational analysis suppressing emotions is just a sophism: education (as second language classes for adults exemplify; as multicultural approaches to teaching imply) should feed itself of emotive responses, and should teach analytical and critical rationales to elaborate these emotive responses in "productive" ways. An adult who is taught a new language with the purpose of finding a job, doesn't interact immediately with the so called high culture (which is likely not to be the same high culture she has in mind) - therefore, if an emotion different from boredom prevails, this may be for instance the necessity to have access to a job, or a sincere interest in integration/assimilation. A student who reads Harry Potter or who is passionate of The Lord of the Rings, may feel more involved in "high culture" teachings when, for instance, literature and history are taught to her with the appeal that normally characterizes historical, political, literary, social facts when related to the lives of everyday people (another chapter to be dealt with....). In a sense, literacy and education can be effective when they become oral, when they function/are consumed as popular mass culture.
Besides, Williams remarks are extremely interesting in respect to the question of authors/sense-makers and audiences. Again, it is internet to shed light on another crucial implication of mass literacy: the authority of a text (being it written, filmed, performed, etc.) and of the ideas it circulates is more and more associated to "anonymous," common, single individuals; authority is being performed and accepted as a mass prerogative, and is presently undergoing a sort of decentralization. Nonetheless, the knowledge and value systems that literacy contains and spreads are strongly dependent on the systems of knowledge production and release to which I referred in the first paragraphs. These systems inevitably influence the ways in which knowledge and its meanings are circulated. It is precisely this influence that generates "low" and "high" cultures, and defines the terms in which content and modes of low and high cultures interact.
Internet can suggest educators and people in general how to adapt themselves to society, or how to adapt society to themselves. The decentralization of authority in meaning-(re)production is a hint. Another hint can be the leveling of the roles of writing and reading.
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Williams, Bronwyn T. Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture & Reading & Writing Online. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
