Reorganizing literacy

By 48614116@N05 on Flickr

Approximately forever ago (that’s March 30 in social media years), I got pretty tired of a certain argument bouncing around the pipes. On the one side, you have the transliteracy early adopters, insisting that transliteracy is a unifying framework covering all types of literacy. On the other side, you have the information literacy purists, insisting that transliteracy is a silly buzzword because, lest we forget, information literacy already covers all types of literacy. The problem is that it isn’t entirely clear that “all” types of literacy are even in the same category.

To the transliteracy folk, I wanted to ask: what does it mean to move across literacies, anyway? How do you move between print literacy, health literacy, and critical literacy, for example. These are categorically different activities, so it just seems nonsensical. To the information literacy crowd, I wanted to ask: if information literacy already covers all literacy-types, why don’t we refer to new readers as ‘information literate’ when they learn to read and write? I smell an equivocation.

So, in this long, long ago time of warring literacies, I put together a post called ‘Literacy’ sucks that tried to categorize competing literacies in a consistent and logical way. Here’s the original chart:

Within a week, the post had more than 1,000 views. Most of my posts would take a month just to get 100 views. By now, this chart has been seen at least 6,000 times on this blog and it’s even being used in some LIS school courses (Howdy,  SI 641!). People are taking this stuff seriously?! 

Anyway, I used this chart at a few conferences over the summer, though, as I studied literacy more, I had to make a few changes. So, here’s an updated (though less-colorful) version of my literacy chart:

It’s largely the same, but there’s an important difference that I’d like to explain…

Literacy refers to both communicative skills and evaluative skills

Rather than divide along medium specific and non-specific lines, I started to think in terms of communication and evaluation as a better way of dividing literacy types. Sometimes when we talk about literacy, we are talking about the commonplace sense of literacy as the ability to read and write. Both reading and writing are required to count as literate in this basic sense. Why? Well, I think it’s because we naturally think of print literacy as a communication skill. And communication is a two-way street; it requires that we can both send and receive information. But, here’s the catch…we don’t have to be able to evaluate the information we’re reading and writing in order to read and write it. Moreover, many people routinely read and write things that would fail even the most basic criteria of information literacy, yet they still count as literate. Lots of people read and write articles explaining homeopathy, Obama’s secret Muslim faith, that link between vaccines and autism, or the shadow government run by George Soros. Of course, when they accept such patent nonsense as true, we don’t say they are illiterate. Information illiterate, yes. But they still have the ability to read and write. So, reading and writing are distinct from the ability to evaluate what is being read or written. Reading and writing are simply a communication skill, a part of sending and receiving messages. 

In contrast, information literacy is all about evaluation. Sure, the bright and shiny digital world makes it seem as though information literacy is tied to computer literacy, but consider the following scenario. A former professor of mine was completely in the dark when it came to using a computer, let alone the Internet. Blogs were a complete novelty and, echoing Michael Gorman, they simply couldn’t be trusted. But, though he couldn’t access an article in JSTOR, when the same article was printed on paper he could make complete sense out of it. I hesitate to say that his lack of computer skills made him information illiterate. As a seasoned academic he was very well-acquainted with scholarly communication and the notions of credibility, authority, and the like. He just preferred his information in print. And whether in print or in JSTOR, it’s the same information. It seems to follow that information literacy is treated as a conceptually separate skill from the functional skills required to use a computer or read a book. Information literacy is about the information, not the medium. 

by s_volenszki, on Flickr

Containers and Content

Let me try to explain the difference between transliteracy and information literacy as simply as possible:

Transliteracy is about containers. Information literacy is about content.

I used to despise the container/content metaphor, but I think it makes perfect sense in this case.

You see, information literacy is all about accessing and evaluating information with the intent of determining if it is truthful or a load of crap, based on certain relevant criteria. When paper ruled the world, it was easy to incorporate both access and evaluation into information literacy because our modes of access required little more than basic print literacy. Yet, as digital communication expanded, information literacy was forced to absorb new and radically different modes of access. Gradually, the nature of accessing information became complex to the point that information literacy started to strain under the burden of new technologies. Though the content is still able to be evaluated by time-tested methods, getting to that content has pushed information literacy in several, often opposing, directions.

This is why I think transliteracy has merit as an approach to information use. Transliteracy alleviates the pressure on information literacy by treating access separately. If information literacy is about the content (the information), then transliteracy is all about the containers. The complexity of the information ecosystem requires that we have some account for how information travels between radically different media, from print to pixels and beyond. That account, I believe, is transliteracy. Transliteracy refers to an ability to transfer meaning between different media…different containers, if you will.  Whether the message is truthful or a load of crap, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of transliteracy. It’s all about the ability to move fluidly between platforms and media.

And in this distinction between content and container, I see echoes of Claude Shannon’s (1948) famous exhortation:

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

The meaning of a given piece of information is separate from issues of communicating that information. The content is separate from the container. In a sense, information literacy addresses the problems of meaning, transliteracy addresses the engineering problem. Why else would the vast majority of articles on transliteracy speak so frequently of ebook readers, social media, the digital divide, tablets, and other technological issues? Why else would articles on information literacy so frequently discuss plagiarism, the credibility of Wikipedia, scholarly communication, and other conceptual issues? We need information literacy so we can think about the meaning of information. We need transliteracy so we can think about the communication of information. In a word, we need both.

So, there you have it. I tinkered with my chart. I’m sure a lot of people will think the communication/evaluation distinction is a load of rubbish. Information literacy folk will say they’ve got access under wraps (as they struggle to cram another technology into a concept bulging at the seams). Transliteracy folk will insist they really are talking about all literacies (as they re-appropriate basic concepts of information literacy). My only response is that it makes sense to me.

• Shannon, Claude E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication“, Part I, Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, (1948): pp. 379-423

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