Lemke, J. L. “Metamedia Literacy: Transforming Meanings and Media.”
Visual Rhetoric in a Visual World: A Critical Sourcebook.
Ed. Carolyn Handa. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 71-93.
In this article, J. L. Lemke opens with the sentence, “Literacies are legion, ” a statement that encapsulates his argument that all literacies are, by their very nature, multimedia, socially constructed, and necessarily the concern of educators worldwide. Though in the past the visual and textual elements of literacy may have been considered distinct, he states that “today our technologies are moving us from the age of writing to an age of multimedia authoring in which voice-annotated documents and images, and written text itself are now merely components of larger meaning objects,” and these objects vary according to their context and relationships with other media. In other words, educators can no longer “get by anymore thinking that there is just one thing called literacy.” (72-73)
Because we live in a world where image, text, audio, and video are increasingly integrated, it is necessary to create pedagogy of metamedia literacy. As communities change, and these changes are influenced and instigated by new technologies, new literacies emerge. As such, “new information technologies, new communication practices, and new social networks make possible new paradigms for education and learning, and call into question the assumptions on which the old paradigms rest” (76).
Reading and writing are no longer the fundamental skills required of a literate populace. Lemke writes, “The generic literacies of the Information Age will certainly include multimedia authoring skills, multimedia critical analysis, cyberspace exploration strategies, and cyberspace navigations skills (Lemke, 1996b)” (77). These are the core principles behind Lemke’s demand for a pedagogical shift: Literacies are legion. The narrow “literacy education traditions” of the past are no longer acceptable. Students must be taught how to interpret, analyze, produce and navigate their way through this multidimensional Information Age. Because we are constantly bombarded by the largely consumer-driven intentions of multimedia, “critical interpretive skills must be extended from the analysis of print texts to video and film, to news photos and advertising images, to statistical charts and tables, and mathematical graphs” (78).
Lemke uses the term “informatic literacies” to define the need for citizens to process and assimilate the wealth of information that is now at their fingertips. If people are not taught these skills, “ future citizens will be as disempowered as those who today cannot write, read, or use a library.” He argues that “these are the necessary skills of our future literacies, those we will all need” (79).
He goes on to distinguish between typological and topological meaning, the first being characteristic of language, the second of visual and spatial relationships. Language tends to classify things into categories and degrees of difference, whereas visual and spatial relationships make meaning “along a continuous spectrum of possibilities, topologically” (80). He argues that it is necessary to integrate both these ways of making meaning to address the transition to metaliteracies. Lemke also argues that there needs to be a shift from the “curricular learning paradigm” to the “interactive learning paradigm,” where learners take on more responsibility to gather and assimilate knowledge and information based on their own needs and interests. He states, “What seems to be generally agreed among educators and many citizens and prospective employers is that we want people, of whatever age, who can guide their own learning and who know enough to know how to learn more, including where and to whom they should turn for useful advice and relevant information” (85). Lemke indicates that this transformation toward a pedagogy of metamedia literacies ultimately points to a “transforming humanity.” He concludes, “No one can predict the transformation of twenty-first century society during the information technology revolution. We certainly cannot afford to continue teaching our students only the literacies of the mid-twentieth century, or even to simply lay before them the most advanced and diverse literacies of today. We must help this next generation to use these literacies wisely, and hope they will succeed better than we have” (91).
This article, as well as others I have read by Lemke, ultimately calls on educators to adapt old pedagogies and create new ones that will adequately address the demands of an educated citizenry living and working in the technology-driven age of information. Education must shift with each passing age, and the pedagogies of industrialized society must now shift to the pedagogies of a society saturated with information, technology and multimedia. Lemke’s work provides a strong theoretical and pedagogical support for the work I am doing in my first-year composition courses. Daily I am challenged to integrate the old with the new. Teaching students to read and write critically means more today than it did 100 years ago, and yet there are still the basic rhetorical principles that are as important now as they were at Aristotle’s Academy. We are at a crossroads, moving forward into unchartered territory while referring to travel logs from the past. Lemke’s scholarship seems to present educators a map for where we are headed, or at the very least, one that hints at where we should intend to go.
Be First to Comment