Enabling Communities
A New LiteracyThe technological advances of synchronous and asynchronous communication have aided in creating a new literacy. Scholars are researching and applying these new forms of literacy as technology advances.
"This clearly has been a watershed year for hypermedia, not only in the consumer marketplace (with the emergence of CD-ROM as a delivery medium for huge amounts of hypermedia data) but also in academic communities like ours, which are beginning to realize the scholarly and pedagogic possibilities of the new technology The software and hardware for digitizing, storing, and producing hypermedia have become markedly cheaper, more powerful, and easier to use; and more and more colleges are setting up computer centers with the necessary equipment and technical support. Our field is at the beginning of the learning curve right now, but it probably will not be long before hypermedia is part of the cinema studies mainstream, both as a teaching tool in classes and as a form of scholarly publication."
http://www.cinemastudies.org/hyper.htm
Hypermedia as a Scholarly Tool, 1998
by Ben SingerA newly defined approach to literacy expands beyond what was formerly research based academic publications. Included in the broadening definition of literacy is a look at the dissemination of information, much of what is now offered through online communities. As our culture expands through technology, so does our ability to access and share experience, generate new knowledge, and publish to a worldwide audience.
Of the grouping of online communities, I have chosen the "enabling" category. To enable means: en*able (verb transitive) en*abled; en*abling
1 a : to provide with the means or opportunity
b : to make possible, practical, or easy
c : to cause to operate
2 : to give legal power, capacity, or sanction to
or:
To give (someone or something) the authority or means to do something.Enabling communities offer diversified groups an opportunity to exchange information and cover any number of topics from health to religion to education. As explained in the article "The Disappearance of Technology", by B. Bruce, information can be accessed, but until it is available cost wise, etc... to the masses, it can be used by power bases to "liberate or oppress." Those without computers are not privy to the new literacy, hence they are without now vital means of communication .
When "enabled" individuals gain access, they have at their fingertips the ability to reach goals, information being possibly the source of all power. The advantage of enabling communities for individuals can be enormous. Within my frame of reference, I will site two cases where I personally was able to see the use of technology for specific gains.
1. Mrs. M. had two autistic children, both at Silvercrest Children's Development Center. As a result of having heard about possible benefits of the enzyme "secretin", she was able to use the online Autism community for gaining highly confidential information about doctors involved in the research of this experimental treatment. Because little was known about the side effects, and as of yet, no approval was given by the FDA, most parents of autistic children were unable to proceed with treatments, much less find access to participating physicians. Furthermore, secretin was not available except through a small number of clinics. Due to her questioning the online community, both children were infused with the drug and demonstrated moderate benefits.
2. Dr. and Mrs. D. have 7-year-old autistic twins, along with three other children under the age of 8. Having sent their children to Silvercrest for behavioral assessments, the children were given programs for the duration of a year, which aided in their learning new skills. However, children with developmental delays require on-going round the clock services in order to make continued progress. Mrs. D., realizing her children's needs, began to look for group homes over the course of a year, and finding none available for her twins. When realizing how helpless she was to find adequate placements, she purchased a computer and went online, scouring through all available information on group homes and available government funding. Mrs. D. is now a full-time advocate for group homes, and is accessing funding for the purposes of developing group homes throughout Indiana. Her computer, as she put it, gave her "power".
http://www.egroups.com/search?type=combined&query=autism
Is literacy merely the ability to read and comprehend the printed word, or has it developed a new meaning? Texts, messages, and information are developing at a rapid-fire pace as we, the public, gain access at a faster rate than any science fiction in years past predicted. Those who have access, and can understand the workings of technology, are the new elite...just as those who could read the Bible "hot off" the Gutenberg press were once the elite.
"Diverse voices have outlined the advantages or disadvantages of technology as they have emerged within classrooms, businesses, communities, and families. Enthusiasts vaunt technological changes, which they contend can effect a more equitable distribution of power. They invoke issues such as empowerment, equality, access, speed, efficiency, liberation, and the development of a global community in support of a pro-technology agenda. As an example, Rheingold's (1993) account of the growth of electronic communication in the Bay Area is framed in terms such as grassroots groupminds and new electronic villages, terms that call forth the potential of new technologies to support a renewal of community. Going further, some proponents promote a form of technological determinism in which new tools or media alone are seen as bringing about a better world.
More cautious observers warn that technologies can be used to reinscribe existing inequitable power relations. They see technology implicated in the loss of jobs, and poor working conditions (see Mikulecky & Kirkley, chap. 18, this volume), surveillance, and regimentation, and caution us about censorship and unequal access. They note that even well-intentioned tools can be used to forward an antidemocratic agenda and that some new technologies support abuses by their very design. Ellul (1980) sees the overall process of technicizing society as "the end of man [humanity]." Technology, he says, "disintegrates and tends to eliminate bit by bit anything that is not technicizable" (p. 203). The result goes far beyond the subordination of humanity to technology.
Thus, we are often faced with a choice between a typically positive, technological determinism and a more negative, social determinism (Bromley, 1997; Bruce, 1993). Rather than conceptualizing the debate via these mutually exclusive and equally deterministic structures, we examine how prevailing ideologies construct the meaning of technologies in different situations. In fact, when technology is used to accomplish specific goals, for certain individuals, in a particular setting, it can be used to liberate or oppress. That is why situated studies of how literacy technologies are used in classrooms, workplaces, or homes and reveal more about these issues than do analyses of technologies or social relations alone (Bowker, Star, Turner, & Gasser, 1997).
...In a similar spirit, the Internet, what McChesney (1995) calls "society's central nervous system" (p. 14), with its millions of users, can foster new relationships and even build new communities based on shared interests and information (Rheingold, 1993; Spender, 1995). These relationships and communities can be far-reaching, relatively inexpensive, and increasingly multilingual, multicultural, and global (see Garner & Gillingham, chap. 13, this volume). In principle, the weblike design of literacy technologies can offer a more equitable distribution of information than any technology we have previously known."
Bertram C. Bruce, Maureen P. Hogan. "The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an Ecological Model of Literacy", College of Education. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Champaign, IL 61820, January 11, 1998
chip@uiuc.eduTo appear in D. Reinking, M. McKenna, L. Labbo, and R. Kieffer (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 269-281). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.