A Little Bit Literate

Oh, please, Mr. Postman.

In thinking more about critical literacy in libraries, I realized that the question I have as a librarian is "In what ways does the library reflect and reinforce cultural and social hierarchies, biases, and power structures?" In other words, are there ways that what we do--or don't do--contributes to marginalizing and/or disenfranchising groups of people? Are there ways that libraries can subvert those structures and biases and empower their users?

One of the missions of libraries, for as long as they have existed as public institutions, has been a support of literacy. The mere existence of a collection of books to be borrowed and read is a great support of literacy, and over the years libraries have extended that support to include literacy classes, summer reading programs for children, and support for reading groups. I would argue that support of literacy is still the central mission of the library, but that how we choose to define literacy may be one of the ways that we reinforce cultural biases.

Postman bemoans the loss of "the typographic mind," though I suspect that it is only the supremacy of the typographic mind that is really at issue. Around the same time that Postman was writing Amusing Ourselves to Death, Howard Gardner proposed his theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner posits, among other intelligences, a "verbal-linguistic" and a "visual-spatial" intelligence, and it seems that Postman is unecessarily setting these two intelligences against each other. Don't get me wrong here. I love books and reading, and I think that reading, especially deep and sustained reading, is important to learning. But, I also think that adding new literacies to the repertoire won't necessarily mean the demise of print literacy. They may, in fact, enhance it.

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A student, let's say, who has a firm grasp on critical "reading" of television may be just as well equipped to engage successfully in society as a student with a high level of print literacy. In our new media ecology, I would argue that people who are able to "read" critically as well as create content ("write"), in multiple media will be better off as citizens and in their every day life. "What steps do you pan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East?" Postman challenges his readers. (68) A media-literate individual (in the age of the internet), can read into news stories from different sources, write blog posts, connect with groups near them or in the Middle East, start a movement online, create video or podcasts and publish them online. The impotence that Postman claims is the result of the telegraph and photography, and ultimately television, seems to be more the result of illiteracy in these media. A similar sort of impotence would result if a person, able to read at a rudimentary level, but not able to read critically or write, were inundated with print media. Giving library users the tools to "read" multiple media critically, as well as to create that media--in other words, supporting critical literacies--will empower even those whose culture isn't necessarily print-oriented (teenagers, for example).

I apologize if this post is a bit scatter-brained. I did most of the readings this week in the midst of a short bout with the flu, so the Postman and boyd and Fitzpatrick mingled with fever dreams of social media and critical literacy and I'm not entirely positive that I entirely extracted one from the other in the end.