Ranta's 12/7/09 Commentary

Here goes nothing – an email on the jranta theory of information ecosystems (I’m a Darwinist, I think).

I like to think about the natural ways for human beings to absorb information and digest stories. How are we built, as information digesters? What works best for us? I also like to think of the natural forms for various kinds of information. What is the natural habitat for a particular story, or a recipe? Does it always belong in a book, or do some stories, some forms of information, more naturally fit in a video, a podcast, a pictogram, etc?

“Proust and the Squid” by Maryanne Wolf is a great book on how human beings had to adapt to books (it’s all that damn Gutenberg’s fault  ). Wolf became a researcher of reading after working with kids with dyslexia. She’s done a lot of brain research, and found that reading is an unnatural act. Our brains have to be rewired to learn to read – we have to do a lot of work to build the synapses that interpret collections of ideographic symbols to determine their meaning, and then to put them together to make sense of them as a story or description. Some of us are quite good at that, and we become adept readers. Many of us do not complete the rewiring, and never become facile readers. Many are labeled dyslexic. Wolf is not anti-reading, she wrote her book so that we’d understand more about the process of reading. But she wanted us to understand that dyslexia is a natural state.

Becoming adept at reading & writing mattered a great deal for the past several hundred years, because the primary means of accessing and conveying information was reading and writing. Reading and writing was the only game in town. If you were one of the many whose brain never managed the rewiring, you were hosed, so to speak.

Some information, and some stories, lend themselves nicely to books. Many other kinds of info do not. If the story or information doesn’t fit easily on the printed page, it was too bad. Up until very recently, it didn’t matter if you had the perfect story for a movie form, or a radio broadcast. The means of production were only available to a very few, and the skills to utilize those media were not widely taught. Since only the wealthy and powerful had access to a printing press, a movie studio, a theater or a radio station, we didn’t bother to train people to use those media. We only taught people to read & write.

In the past 10 years we've seen a tremendous democratization of media, brought on by the wide availability of high speed internet connections, inexpensive personal computers, video cameras and editing software. No longer do the high priests of media control broadcasting & production. No longer are we mere consumers of media. And no longer is reading and writing the only game in town. Each of us can become a reporter, a director, an author, a commentator, etc. - and millions of us are training ourselves to do that. Granted, we are all new to this, and we're still making mistakes. But it’s very cool that we now we can create stories in any form we choose, in the form that best suits our abilities and our style, and share them with the world.

In my humble opinion, reading and writing (and books) are not going away, but I think they are becoming less prominent in our information ecosystem. And other media can now grow to take their natural places. In the information ecosystem, each media form is finding a niche, where it is best suited both to the individual communicator, and to the information itself.

I can see us (educators) going in one of two directions with literacy education:

1. One is to expand our definition, and teach a broader media literacy as opposed to a narrow text literacy. In other words, teaching each student to become a generalist in media production and digestion. That means including video, animation, audio along with reading and writing in our curricula.
2. The other is to attempt to identify each student’s media strengths and abilities, and map individual education plans to their strengths. That would mean understanding which student is the adept reader and writer, and focusing their work in that area, while enabling and supporting the videographer or animator or audiographer equally, in the classroom.

JR