Defending Electracy: Ulmer on the Need for the Term
Wikipedia editors are once again arguing that the electracy entry ought to be merged into the information and media literacy entry. (Which is, I guess, a much better fight to be having than when some Wikipedia editors decided the term should be killed altogether.) To help make the case, Ulmer posted the following passage to the Invent-L discussion list, which I post here for my own archival purposes:
The upshot of this bottom-up method is not ‘literacy,’ a knowledge we already ‘know,’ but a set of behaviors Gregory Ulmer calls ‘electracy,’ a knowlege citizens of networked cultures ‘see’ and ‘do.’ Agile operators, willy-nilly, of computer keyboards, ATMs, cell phones, PDAs, Gameboys, iPods, and the other devices of our digital epoch, we are already, in an unreflective fashion and in various degrees, at ease with digitality. ‘The nice thing about having such a term,’ Ulmer tells Talan Memmott, ‘is not only the efficiency, but the categorical effect it produces. For one thing, it helps us see the difference between [electracy] and media literacy ([a term] whose goal is to protect from or defend against electracy by means of forms and practices specific to the previous apparatus; the equivalent for an oral person calling literacy alphabetic orality’). (6)
From: Morris, Adelaide. “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write.” New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Eds. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. MIT Press, 2006.
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