Social media and videogames are often blamed for individual behavioural delinquency, but rarely praised for cultural creativity, social innovation or helping us to form new social groups or work through new ideas. Videogames are now a political football, both in the US (where they’re blamed for gun crime) and in China (where they’re blamed for childhood myopia and ‘excessive consumption’). Gun crime:
In November 2019, China’s central government authorities issued new regulations for minors who play online games and the corporations that supply them. A spokesperson for the State Press and Publication Administration was interviewed by
‘Resolutely curb indulging and protect the healthy growth of young people’. New regulations ‘Preventing Minors from Indulging in Online Games’ are announced (November 5, 2019). Source: Xinhuanet.
Real-name online registration;
Time limits on individual gaming with an overnight curfew;
Age and payment limits for minors;
Strengthened industry supervision;
Revisions to the age-adjustment system, noting that ‘age-appropriate reminders are not equivalent to Western grading systems, and harmful content such as pornography, bloodyness, violence, and gambling must not be allowed in games for adults’;
Parents, schools and other social forces to provide those under their guardianship ‘effective supervision and support’. ‘Resolutely curb indulging and protect the healthy growth of young people – the relevant person in charge of the State Press and Publication Administration answered the “Notice on Preventing Minors from Indulging in Online Games”’/坚决遏制沉迷, 保护青少年健康成长——国家新闻出版署有关负责人就《关于防止未成年人沉迷网络游戏的通知》答记者问. Xinhuanet 新华网 (5 November 2019):
In linking the family responsibilities of parents and social responsibility of corporations with the coercive control of children by the state, China is following a well-worn path, in common with Western nations and control agencies going back several centuries. Every new media form has grown up surrounded by those wanting to control it, from the invention of print and the industrialisation of mass media with the press, broadcasting, cinema, popular fiction and so on, to computational play, digital culture and online affordances. Throughout modernity, authorities have greeted new-media usage by unregulated, untutored populations – always imagined as the vulnerable or unruly child – as dangerous, deviant or disordered. Most recently, the American Psychiatric Association has designated a new condition called ‘internet gaming disorder’ in their influential and widely used
Despite this seeming agreement across countries and agencies, not everyone does agree that there is evidence for negative social effects. As the
Ferris Jabr, ‘Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?’
The See
With hindsight it is clear that the popular uses of previously dominant (print and broadcast) media have not fulfilled the worst fears of critics, but instead have played a significant social role in developing modern knowledge systems, coordinating, cementing and informing national and other identities at population scale. It is equally clear that contemporary platforms continue to play the same role, but much less scholarly attention has been paid to the process by which users, organisations (both public and private) and sociocultural groups produce and communicate
This brings us to ‘open literacy’. Popular literacy has never been free and open; but on the other hand it has also always been used in ways that confound official surveillance. Can it be nurtured, and extended to whole populations, across demographic borders, at global scale, for purposeless but still pedagogic play, and for social innovation, instead of being a mere instrument for profit and power among commercial interests and for population control and mass persuasion among state agencies? Popular literacy has never been free and open. Popular novels and the press, cinema and broadcasting, and more recently digital and social media, have all developed within control regimes favouring incumbent commercial, government or social interests. But in the era of open access, open science, open knowledge and now ‘open communication’, what about open literacy? Computer-based games and social media now enjoy global popularity, but regulatory regimes remain preoccupied with their behavioural impact on individuals (‘games addiction’ and ‘screen time’), rather than on their role in the growth and spread of knowledge among diverse populations.
This paper departs from prior approaches to literacy, whether chiefly literary (Richard Hoggart), educational (David Buckingham), social-psychological (Sonia Livingstone) or technological (Microsoft).
Having said that this is a divergent approach to digital literacy, it must be pointed out that different approaches are convergent upon the problems it causes policymakers. The ‘openness’ of games, digital literacy and media literacy to different interpretations and usages confuse the question of their social impact, and appropriate policy responses remain decidedly ‘open’. Here are two of the most prominent observers:
Whether it is seen as ‘someone else’s responsibility’ or ‘the zombie of media literacy’, or, as in this paper, a ‘mischievous response’ with insurrectionary and rebellious potential, it seems that ‘the media literacy of the public’ remains a very hot potato. And that’s an old story…
Literacy has become an attractive token, meaningless and helpless by itself, over possession of which entire societies, led by hotheads who should know better, contend for years at a time, to destructive effect on all sides, all for the sake of a story. In other words, literacy is the ‘Helen of Troy’ of the
As for Helen herself, what she thought of her various abductions, suitors and husbands remains uncertain, not least because, of course, she’s an artefact of story and mythology, not history. Helen was the daughter of the Swan (a.k.a. Zeus), who raped Leda, queen of Sparta: Helen was abducted as a child by Theseus of Athens, rescued by her brothers (Castor and Pollux); married Menelaus; was abducted (or eloped) as a prize by Paris of Troy; married Paris, and Paris’s brother Deiphobus after his death; returned to Sparta with Menelaus after Troy was destroyed. See:
Indeed, both Helen and literacy stand for impersonal forces, social tensions, historical transformations and collective dynamics – in Helen’s case, the end of the age of divine-born heroes; in literacy’s case, the promise of heroic futures to come. Both stand in for forces they themselves can’t control, one of them personified in the myth of the Trojan Wars; the other kicked about as a political football in the culture wars.
Understanding that literacy has a mythic dimension is as important as knowing that Helen’s mythic status – Marlowe’s ‘face that launch’d a thousand ships’ – explains her ( Christopher Marlowe,
Helen of Troy in art: paintings by J-L. David (1788) and Tintoretto (1578–9) emphasise different aspects of the myth – sexuality, seduction, compulsion, abduction, violence and rape. Images: Wikimedia Commons.
We are well past the time when literacy can be defined, or its value assessed objectively, without taking account of its status as a prize (willing or otherwise) in conflicts in which ‘defining’ it is what’s at stake in the game. We have to recognise that literacy’s meaning, purpose and fate are determined by those conflicts.
Just as Helen of Troy means much more as myth than any Bronze-Age trophy-bride, so it is important to analyse not only literacy itself but also how it is represented and narrated; what ‘character’ it is given by those who argue over it in public debates; what value is ascribed to it in the media, politics, technological and industrial discourses; what ‘plot’ is contrived to deliver its promised redemption to the ‘winner’. And, as with any good story worth a series on Netflix, so much depends on the showrunner – so we need to ask, who is its Homer?
The idea that literacy is explained by reference to the behaviour or demand of individuals is itself a myth. Literacy can only be understood in the context (and as a product) of the organised institutional agency of the state, not the individual behaviour of a culture warrior or even storyteller. In other words, literacy is not an individual accomplishment but a strategic resource for states, where organisation and institutional scale and the ability to manage complexity are more important than trophies of war (or ‘geras’ in Homeric terms).
Focusing on individual competitiveness as the main ‘use’ for literacy impoverishes our understanding of how it works, because – like vaccination – literacy can only work at group level. Further, it inhibits or ignores the development of new literacies, emergent from ‘new’ media (literacies associated with orality, writing, print, broadcasting, computation and the internet), organised into new knowledge systems (e.g. evolutionary and complexity theory), or emerging out of previously neglected cultural struggles and group-forming movements (e.g. identity politics and emergent countries).
The
This is where the concept of ‘open literacy’ comes in, drawing analytical attention away from the security anxieties of control-culture, beyond the economic needs of the ‘big end of town’ or the authoritarian nation-state, and beyond behavioural individualism, directing us towards possibilities emergent from media, knowledge systems and struggles that currently don’t figure in official policy, except as threats (where they count as costs, not benefits).
We need to think about Greeks bearing gifts. As scholars of culture, media and communication, we need to identify the ‘uses of literacy’ as something more than a rhetorical token in adversarial politics; and to expand what counts as literacy beyond the current packaged form, where state coercion and control over wayward populations require the compulsory abduction of children to strange places, where they must spend the next ten years while others fight over their still uncertain future. If literacy is our culture’s Helen, then schools are its Troy: their ‘topless towers’ seemingly impregnable, but – both sides of the culture wars seem to agree – doomed.
Public education has attracted a persistent campaign by libertarian and conservative culture warriors, who agitate for the privatisation of state assets and institutions, in order to reduce the burden of government on free-market enterprise, while adding the perceived advantages of the market. Here, the modern state monopolisation of literacy (and its public representation) is no longer seen in collective terms as a strategic investment in national capacity. Instead, one kind of literacy – based on print, taught by phonics and monitored by psycho-linguistic testing of individuals – is selected over others. Next, state education systems are criticised for ‘failure’ to improve competitive scores in such tests (and because
Mass literacy is reduced to ‘costly signalling’: the ability to pay for it and to endure its disutility and waste qualifies you as a docile employee, while the real market is not the content or quality of your literacy but the brand-power of the school or college in which you endured it. In
Literacy becomes a token in a political tug of war. The real struggle is between state regulation and market deregulation. Ground gained by either side may change who wins control over the prize, which – like Helen in Homer – seems to be what they’re fighting over but has no effect on the outcome.
Literacy remains a familiar topic in both news and the academy. It has escaped the confines of its origins as a term to describe the ability to read and write, and is generally accepted as a foundational social technology of modernity.
The definition of literacy has become broader but more abstract in order to apply it across:
Technologies – digital as well as analogue,
Symbol-systems – mathematical and audio-visual as well as alphabetic,
Languages and cultures – global as well as national.
Thus, for UNESCO, OECD and other transnational agencies, literacy entails acquiring skills and competence to access knowledge through technology:
Source:
Literacy is a proxy for See:
However, the transactional approach has never seemed sufficiently
It encourages neither radical nor unpredictable uses. In Umberto Eco’s (1989) schema of ‘open works’ and ‘closed works’, instrumental literacy confines its users to ‘closed’ works. This is why critics see it as only a portal to something of greater value: ‘
Here,
Richard Hoggart’s influential book of that name (1957) took it for granted that if mass literacy goes no further than engagement with the ‘closed’ texts of TV, the flicks, pulp fiction and salacious magazines, then this is a
Hoggart argued that popular literacy left ordinary people intellectually and politically unemancipated. He wanted to encourage ‘uses of literacy’ that would arm them against ‘being conned’ by what they read in the papers, and enable them to use literacy for their own imaginative life, based on class, community and critique.
In a sense, this was also a developmental agenda (indeed, Hoggart went on to take a top position at UNESCO), ‘In 1969, at the age of 51, he was offered … an assistant director-generalship at Unesco. … He travelled three times round the world but was appalled by what he regarded as the misconduct, bureaucracy, infighting and laziness he found within the organisation. In 1975 he resigned and wrote a critical book about it,
Hoggart’s breakthrough book stood apart and took stock at a time of deindustrialisation and decolonisation, within a post-war cultural ferment identified with the ‘angry young men’ of the arts, theatre and cinema. He originally wanted to called it
Thus,
However, in the very midst of his forensic critique of ‘publications and entertainments’ of the kind that were foisted on ‘people like us’, Hoggart discovered a previously unexamined world where
The very ‘apparatus’ that he found ‘unacceptable’ was gaining traction with them in ways that he couldn’t see. He was notoriously impatient with youth, loitering in milk-bars, jigging about to American music on the juke box (1957: 202–5). Here they are, ‘ground between the millstones of technocracy and democracy’, the ‘directionless and tamed helots of a machine-minding class’:
But what did they portend? Here, Hoggart missed something that educated, critical and literate opinion has struggled with from that day to this, which is that ‘play’, understood here as conspicuous time-wasting, daydreaming and mischief, choosing to adopt semiotic in-group preferences designed to annoy others, are the crucible of creative innovation and new forms of sociality, solidarity and radical opportunity; using the texts at hand as ‘open works’ in Eco’s sense (1989).
In other words, leisured purposelessness with new technologies and ‘entertainments’ – dismissed by Hoggart as ‘a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk’ (1957: 204) – can be very far from useless, as the subsequent youth cultures of the 1960s proved – not only commercially in the global music business, but also politically, as insurrectionary and ‘alternative’ lifestyles.
Hoggart wanted to reform traditional working-class culture; the ‘juke-box boys’ and girls wanted to rock and roll. It may be argued that the politics of intellectual emancipation shifted decisively at this point, and not just in the UK. Without anyone intending it, and just when its self-organising history was being documented by class-conscious intellectuals such as Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, the strongly institutionalised and internally disciplined industrial working class yielded place to a more chaotic market-led pop culture that was less about class solidarity than individual expression and social mixture. This in turn became the techno-democratic ground that nurtured new forms of consciousness (and music) that led to the protest songs and countercultures of the 1960s and – incidentally – to new types of cultural studies (Hall, CCCS). Out of these emerged new social movements organised around gender, sexuality, ethnic identity, alternative lifestyles and peace, whose own ‘literacy’ was written in music and dance, dress and design, cars and cinemas, travel and technology, not so much in the union, Co-op and Labour movements. These youngsters were literate in ways that previous technologies of mass organisation were slow to recognise, much less adopt – from ‘protest’ songs like Peter Paul & Mary’s ‘If I Had a Hammer’ to Charles Manson’s supposedly Lennon-inspired
Since then, literacy has expanded, not only around the world, as measured by UNESCO, but conceptually too, in three main ways:
First,
• Second,
Third;
The last of these alternatives – the culture wars – has had a decisive structuring effect on the others, so that now you can’t approach the topic historically, by discipline or medium. First, you have to align with a political ideology. Even if your work is scrupulously scholarly and politically neutral, ‘literacy’ is still not ‘open’, either as a field of study or as a practical skill. Instead, it is taught and deployed as an ideological weapon in larger-scale contestations. It’s a proxy for partisan politics.
One of the most toxic (and incomprehensible) examples has flourished in the Australian culture-wars, lasting for at least as long as the Trojan Wars. Are you in favour of teaching literacy using a ‘whole language’ or a ‘phonics’ approach? If you read See: See:
And see:
But this is not a parochial Australian storm-in-a-teacup. Ian Bogost has recently argued in
But the people who say such things – and those who read and re-cycle such notions – are not randomly distributed through the population. Does the games industry teach children to kill children? If you’re a Republican (NRA-supporter), the answer is yes; but if you’re a Democrat (gun-control supporter), the answer is no (
AOC teaches an alternative kind of political literacy. Twitter: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
This rift goes deep, beyond the reach of reason and evidence, and not just in the USA. Literacy has tribalised into non-overlapping, adversarial ‘we’-groupings that only interact through competition and mutual hostility, not by translating ideas and knowledge (and the competence to use them) from one knowledge domain or group to another.
The evolution of knowledge systems has produced two kinds of knowledge at macro-level, quite apart from all the specialisms.
Connective’ or
Productive’ or
Where pre-modern, tribal groups could get by on ‘connective’ knowledge, later monarchical-imperial societies
The connective type is based on
The productive type requires a combination of three elements (Malešević and Ryan, 2013; Malešević, 2017):
complex organisation (bureaucracy);
binding ideologies (gods or kings – or their contemporary homologies); and
‘microsolidarity’ (mateship) among specialised/expert units.
These elements work together to See:
There are obvious overlaps between this model and a more familiar one derived from Ong (2012), McLuhan (1962), Goody and Watt (1963) and others (including Laslett 1965/2015, Lotman 1990: 245–253), on the modes of thought and cultural consequences of
Contemporary political populism has learned to exploit this type of connective but ubiquitous literacy, e.g. where the Tweeting President uses strongly oral, tribal, connective means to conduct statecraft, and counters scientific scepticism with scepticism about science, dubbing modern, literate, institutional and productive knowledge ‘fake news’, ‘a hoax’, the ‘Washington swamp’, etc., making things up to suit his own narrative arc, and pressuring state agencies to fall in line – as with the track of Hurricane Dorian.
Literacy is a phenomenon that only works at meso (institutional) scale, but it is treated and taught as a micro-scale (individual) ‘skill’. Something’s got to give. As the University of Miami’s Brian McNoldy told
Source:
It’s already too late. Hurricane Dorian was clearly a Democrat…
According to historian Peter Turchin, writing in 2013 before a Trump presidency was even on the horizon of the imaginable, the ‘leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020’, when ‘the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval’.
Using long-term analysis of wealth-inequality and social-wellbeing indicators, Turchin argues that ‘social wellbeing’ Turchin’s measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism). Measured by the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). See also:
Peter Turchin’s data-map for ‘inequality moves in cycles’. Illustration © Peter Turchin 2013.
The resources of both the state and corporate – or ‘carceral’ – capitalism are used to tighten control (Wang, 2018), Critiquing ‘carceral society’ is now a distinct area of research. See for instance:
How to keep disparate and conflicted societies together? Current trends suggest that although surveillance, authoritarian control and the erosion of mass privacy are ascendant in both public and private sector enterprise, social polarisation and instability are still on the increase. Turchin’s data analytics indicate that – sooner or later – the pendulum swings:
Is this an argument for a return to the ‘consensus’ about literacy that was reached in the industrial era of the nineteenth and twentieth century? If so, it’s a very limited consensus:
Harvey Graff pointed out that the first mass literacy was only promoted to the extent that it satisfied those goals, but no further:
It seems that such a constraint – ‘controlled’ literacy for ‘properly schooled’ and ‘morally restrained’ populations – is still the goal of front-line culture-warriors like the purportedly libertarian IPA and supposedly ‘free-market’, ‘free speech’ News Corp:
Literacy is good for teaching the ideology of individualism (‘instructing them about the values around individual rights, parliamentary democracy and equality before the law’);
It’s not just News Corp; it’s the public broadcaster too. When hundreds of thousands of school students and their supporters joined the global #schoolstrike4climate across Australia (20 September 2019), the ABC looked in vain to represent ‘both sides’ of the story, until they found Kevin Donnelly. The story included this: ‘The movement has been controversial in Australia, with
If schooling has been captured as an Althusserian ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, then where is the pressure for change going to come from? Turchin’s historical model provides an answer: elites only ‘tire’ of ‘inter-elite competition’ after a period of ‘incessant violence and disorder’. Counter-intuitively, a ‘more cooperative’ mode of governing and hope for ‘social order’ are triggered by political activism and instability. It seems that ‘open literacy’ and ‘social responsibility’ are
Can ‘open literacy’ connect the scientific traditions of ‘productive knowledge’ with the group-cohering solidarity of ‘connective knowledge’ to promote ‘social responsibility’ for the planet, and not just for the home nation? A glimmer of hope comes from the margins, uniting ‘open access’, ‘open science’ and ‘open knowledge’ with activism such as Extinction Rebellion, schoolstrike4climate and many such organisations. Can that model be extended to whole populations, across demographic borders, at global scale, for social innovation, instead of confining literacy as a mere instrument for securing profit, power, mass persuasion and surveillance?
Of course, the answer must rewrite myth as well as history. Deliverance cannot come from within the walled fortresses of Troy or Trump, but from outsiders who sail across the world to change everything ( For ‘the ignorant teenage climate puppet’ (Fox News) and ‘Make America Greta Again’ (Swedish placard), see:
Greta Thunberg, outside the Swedish parliament. (2018). Photo Anders Hellberg, Wikimedia Commons: