Deeper Literacy

 

Information is the ’stuff’ of work for many of us and much of it is in the form of text–we gather much of our new knowledge from the written word and we in turn communicate much of what we have found by authoring documents which we hope readers will find and spend time and effort on to try to understand.

 

However, we are of course not authoring or reading in isolation, we are living in a time of development of new strains of social media which propel credibility-free ‘stories’ at digital speed and when, at the same time, academic repositories burst at the seams with documents which are too numerous and too opaque to go through in any reasonable amount of time.

 

Additionally, the combination of artificial intelligence and ‘big’ data analysis & actions, steered by financial and ideological interests, makes for treacherous information navigation. The questions of what is useful credible and authentic versus that which is propaganda or simply fake, has becomes more challenging to deal with.

 

We need to re-form our information environments into something more open, transparent and interactive–into a digital liquid information environment–where we can provide ever more powerful tools for the user to become ever more deeply literate and thus more capable at handling the information work demanded of us.

 

In order to survive and thrive with this landscape, we will need to develop ever deeper literacies.

 

This is an issue of education, culture and of building the software tools which allows the literacies to develop.  This is why I am developing the Liquid software and I hope it's not to bold to ask for your feedback–the promise of deeper literacy is powerful and to realise it we need to work together–this software are just two small parts of a bigger puzzle.

 

For more about the notion and passion for Deep Literacy please visit: deep-literacy.info and to learn about our annual Future of Text Symposium please visit futureoftext.org