YouTube Review: Imagining Literacy in the Digital Landscape

Community Literacy Journal Apr 2010 OA PDF

YouTube Review: Imagining Literacy in the Digital Landscape

Jim Bowman St. John Fisher College

Abstract

Digital artists have created a slew of literacy-themed texts using various combinations of photography, video, music, and writing. Creators of such forms regularly post these clips to online video-sharing sites like YouTube.com, where they provide audiences with diverse messaging about the significance and value of literacy. This review examines four such clips: "Literacy Empowers (Illiteracy Awareness Documentary), " "Bookwise Quotes: The Importance of Literacy, " "Reading Kills (Protesting Literacy at the RNC), " and "21st Century Literacy. " Each one addresses a different dimension of literacy and has been accessed several thousands of times. Whether these texts achieve their disparate purposes remains an open question, but what they argue and how they articulate their messages reveal how literacy is no less contested or open to (mis)appropriation in cyberspace than in more traditional cultural domains. While each begins with an implicit acknowledgement of the unrealized promises of literacies, none offer a coherent response to the enormous and asymmetrical challenges of creating critically literate global citizens.

Journal: Community Literacy Journal
Published: 2010-04-01
DOI: 10.25148/clj.4.2.009449
Open Access: OA PDF Bronze
Topics: social media place and space