Technology & Innovation - Issue 11

21st century technologies are reshaping how we all read and write, observes David Voisin – so is it time to reconsider the modern definition of ‘literacy’? H ow detrimental has digital technology been to literacy? Historically, of course, new technologies have often been blamed for corrupting and debasing language, despite not actually doing so. The Canadian intellectual, Stephen Pinker, once joked about this phenomenon, citing a humorous cartoon depicting two figures in ancient Egypt looking at engravings on a wall, while lamenting the gradual worsening of their hieroglyphic writing. And yet, the latest set of worldwide PISA scores would seem to indicate a worrying drop in literacy rates that suspiciously coincides with the advent and subsequent growth of social media… Exploiting the plasticity Pinker has previously explained how reading erupted so suddenly within our social evolution that its mechanics had to be ‘bolted on’ to our existing brain circuitry. Even within the span of one individual’s lifetime, the acquisition of literacy takes place at lightning speed. As the literacy scholar and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf observes in her book Proust and the Squid , an invention that took 2,000 years to emerge has to be taught to a child over a period of 2,000 days: “ Literacy changes our brains, which changes the life trajectory of a person, which changes society, which changes our species. ” The ways in which younger generations have adapted to the digital age have been fast too, but we’re now talking about exponential celerity. In his book The Anxious Generation , the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt employs the rather sombre term ‘rewiring’ in pointing out how the profusion of apps that have emerged from Silicon Valley and elsewhere exploit the plasticity of young brains, in effect permanently engraving said software into adolescents’ vulnerable minds. This window of opportunity – the teenage years – is a span of time in which we, as teachers, are able to witness first-hand the tremendous damage new technologies can wreak. Timewell invested The expression ‘reading for pleasure’ is a misleading one. We don’t read for pleasure , but we may well get pleasure from reading . People read very different things, and with very different aims – though as the psychology professor Daniel T. Willinghamhas pointed out, the problem isn’t that teens don’t like reading. It’s that it simply isn’t their first choice of activity. The linguist George Lakoff has previously shown how language is imbued with metaphors – see howwe ‘spend’ time, for example. Reading is thus time well invested, being an activity found to carry huge cognitive and social gains. When it comes to social media, however, Jonathan Haidt talks about such activity in terms of ‘cost benefit’. The damage it does stems not just fromwhat the product offers, but in what it takes away from other activities that could potentially do more to benefit a child’s development. App designers use all the tricks in the psychology toolbox to activate young people’s dopamine and get themhooked. InMaryanne Wolf’s view, “ Most of our youth and children are the recipients of multiple distractions that continuously claim their limited attention. ” Happiness in routines But if digital technology can create dangerous habits, then it can also help educators foster healthy routines. In his book Atomic Habits , writer James Clear states that we “ Raise to the level of our goals and fall to the level of our systems. ” “Books nourish the imagination – socialmedia force-feeds us distorted reality” Literacy in the DIGITAL AGE 20 teachwire.net