Post-Literacy, by Michael Ridley
News from Educause 2004: Michael Ridley, Chief Librarian at Guelph University (Canada) gave a thought-provoking presentation on the issue of “Post-Literacy: The Past and Future of Ideas.”
Humans originally cultivated an oral culture which endured for thousands of years. This culture had particular characteristics. Finally, with the development of written language, the oral culture was displaced. Written language and then the printing press with its promise of mass documentation and increased access to the written word caused a profound change in how humans viewed and interacted with their world.
Ridley believes that it is inevitable that the literacy we know and cherish will be displaced. Inevitable. To explore that idea he offered a freshmen seminar at his university, encouraging his students to explore this idea and try to vision what will replace literacy.
Certain technologies are inherently disruptive; they force change, create discomfort, and transition to something different and more advantageous to the species than what they replaced. The issue of the need for the change to be advantageous is critical and controversial.
When one lives in a culture permeated by disruptive technologies, “a desire for continuity becomes a dysfunctional mirage.” As an English teacher in love with the power of words, I am challenged to view my desire for continuity of the “book culture” as dysfunctional or as a mirage. But challenging our assumptions is Ridley’s goal.
So orality was replaced by literacy, a door which, once you walk through, you cannot return to the past. He did note that a secondary orality seems to be emerging, and I second that idea by adding that “story-telling” is regaining a role of importance in creating dynamic online learning. Stories engage us on a deeper level than facts alone. In Tennessee, Jonesborough (the oldest city in TN) holds an International Story Telling Festival every autumn that is magically marvelous. I attend at every opportunity and always feel as if I have been transported back to a richer more creative time. The power of the spoken word is magical.
Orality is grounded in the physical, the presence of a community, the body. It depends upon memory and performance. It is magical, in an ancient sense of the term “magic.”
Literacy is evidenced in the object: the book, the computer, the film. All external to the body. It is based on logic and composition. It is rational, rather than magical.
He insists that he is not talking about the “decline” of literacy. He insists that post-literacy must be better. He identifies some of the traits essential to this new literacy:
• Clarity and precision
• Expressiveness, with nuances
• Persistent, through time and space
• Offering advantages to the individual and group
His students came up with the following candidates for post-literacy
• Bio-computing
• Unused capacity of the human brain
• Telepathy and the collective unconscious
• Genetic memory (we won’t have to “learn” things; we will be born with them innately)
• Post-humans (we are okay but our tool set is all wrong, limiting)
How will we get there? Where will post-literacy come from? His students answered “Aliens.”
One of his most intriguing lessons from this course was the following incident. To examine their suggestion about telepathy and untapped powers of the human consciousness, he invited a “medium” to conduct a séance with the class. Consequences of this action:
1. he was reported to the provost by some of his peers
2. some of the students became profoundly uncomfortable in the medium’s presence
How marvelous! Both of these are precisely the point. If we have moved from the magical to the rational, how do we “understand” the powers this woman appeared to be demonstrating, with our “rational” judgment filters?
The context of the séance may appear “magical,” but it must be dismissed because it doesn’t fit the rational model. This model is a filter which rigorously excludes that which is deemed by the culture to be unacceptable. How has that culture determined the filters through which I view myself and my potential?
