I first came across the term “transliteracy” when I started studying New Media last year. I thought it was an academic term for what is an essential and unnamed study in linguistics – the switching between different forms of media or styles of language/communication. I have been teaching this at GCSE and A Level for years. Odd that it surfaced in New Media circles with a posh name. Thought no more of it.
Then I was introduced to the work of the PART group, and subscribed to the rss feed for their blog. I then started to think: “Maybe I have misunderstood something fundemental here…”. Ask no questions – don’t want to look stupid, afterall! Maybe all will become clear :S
Today, the blog invited people to join their GoogleGroup, and in the spirit of all things communal and interesting, I did so. In the spirit of all things live and therefore imperfect, the GoogleGod appears to be having a problem with this site at the momet, so I cannot include the link. How frustrating!
I found the conversation engaged in finding a focus for the study of transliteracy, and the wonderfully clarifying point that transliteracy is really something linguists have been working on for a long time. I felt soooo much better for seeing that in print in a discussion! It did make me feel a bit of a numpty for never asking if it was one and the same issue.
So, what is different?
Well, the PART group look like they are trying to establish an interdisciplinary approach to looking at how people communicate across a range of media. The issue involves not just linguists apparently, but many other fields where communication methods are of interest. Giving the study of this issue a name (the ubiquitous “Transliteracy”) and establishing a dialogue across these fields highlights this very interesting propensity in the human communicative constitution. It also has identified the very new skills people are developing in response to New Media and the internet – what Joanna Howard dubbed “3D Literacy” after I commented that I thought of transliteracy as being a very much three dimensional thing in this new media age. We are no longer just reading an article, or listening to the radio, or whatever…. we are now doing several of these activities simultaneously using our computers – sometimes within one single piece. These are being dubbed “transliterate artefacts”, which the PART group is seeking to collect (or links thereof).
This might sound like multi-tasking gone mad, but people are doing it! I find myself engaged in this type of experience virtually every time my computer is switched on. I have podcasts playing, blog feeds appearing on my screen, people popping up on msn or skype… and yet I don’t think anything of juggling these communication platforms, with their different conventions and jargons – absorbing information at different levels from each. When I teach students to identify texts by audience and publication context, I now think of all these new internet forms and wonder how long it will be before their conventions will creep into GCSE and A Level syllabii. Probably not soon enough, knowing just a little about how curriculae work!
That said, I quite like the idea of 3D-literacy and transliteracy as expressions of how we move between vastly different modes of communication. When you sit back and think about it, it really is quite amazing how we do this… you can’t possibly say the human brain is not hard-wired for communication: we seem to do it by whatever means available, absorbing codes and establishing agreed symbols to bridge any divide – electronic or otherwise. Transliteracy is pretty clever stuff, really!
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