A Review of The Emerging Cyberculture: Literacy, Paradigm, and Paradox
The Emerging Cyberculture: Literacy, Paradigm, and Paradox is a book of many movements, which trace the ways in which new communications technologies are impacting current notions and conceputalizations of literacy. The book's contributors, all of whom are academic specialists in the scholarly study of technology and literacy, suggest that new technologies, such as the Internet, offer us new ways to communicate with one another (and thus new literacies), and new ways of thinking about literacy.edited by Stephanie Gibson and Ollie Oviedo
Hampton Press, 2000
ISBN: 1-572-73196-6. 365 pp. $29.95Review by Jonathan Alexander
University of Cincinnati
To demonstrate this, as well as to gauge the ways in which literacy is shifting in relation to new technologies, the editors have divided the collection into four parts ("movements") that show us (1) examples from the past in which technological innovation has shaped literacy, (2) contemporary examples of shifts in literacy prompted by technology, (3) the ways in which new conceptions of self and community can arise in response to shifts in technology, and (4) how changes in literacy prompted by technology manifests themselves across the disciplines.
Ultimately, each section provides us with a glimpse into how literacy itself is in motion. I characterize these sections as "movements" because the book asks us to think about ways technology affects shifts in literacy through imagery and metaphors of motion. These metaphors shape the ways meaning moves between individuals and communities.