Literacy and the Human Network

At this point in the semester (and with the help of the
explanatory draft assignment), I’ve begun to connect the primary sources to the
numerous theories we’ve encountered and also to class discussions – blogs, tweets
and in-person conversations.  The latest
assignment – reading Burgess and Green’s YouTube:
Digital Media and Society Series – connected some previous ideas from the
class to this book’s content.
Specifically, the passage in chapter 4’s “YouTube’s Social Network”
entitled “Literacy and the Social Network.”
Here, Burgess and Green examine the history behind literacy, from print
to media, and the significance of human involvement in new forms of
literacy.  Being part of a “participatory
culture” (70) makes up a great deal of YouTube’s successes and its longevity in
this digital age – and, as Burgess and Green further discuss, defining literacy
should rely on the notion of a participatory culture.  “…’literacy is not a self-evident thing
individuals can possess, and nor are any of the possible specific ‘literacies.’  Literacies, rather, are produced by, and
practiced in, particular social and historical contexts” (71).  It seems that Burgess and Green are arguing
for individuals to interact with new media in order to become literate in it,
to teach themselves a new language almost.

This section, providing also the examples of Paul Oakley,
an elderly British man who videotaped his first experiment with a webcam and
published it on YouTube, along with Geriatric927’s lessons for nursing home
residents on using a computer, triggered my memory back to the beginning of
this class where many of us were nervous to engage in new forms of media.  I remember numerous blog posts from the class
saying blogging and tweeting were foreign and new and kind of scary, but look
at us now – we blog and tweet weekly, leave comments on blogs and can now
engage in conversations about the affordances of digital media in the
classroom.  The fact that Oakley’s first
video post – “First Try” – garnered so much traffic on YouTube says something, at
least in my opinion, about the human race.
We all get overwhelmed by new things and fear failure, or looking stupid
in front of our peers, and our sentiments from our first blog posts about
feeling nervous and inexperienced speak to this universal truth.  Yet, we all encouraged each other or said we
felt similar things through comments and tweets and this emphatic notion is
probably the biggest reason why Oakley’s post was viewed more than two and a
half million times.  The human connection
can still be found on the web.

1 comment October 16, 2011