{"id":54,"date":"2016-12-18T14:23:18","date_gmt":"2016-12-18T14:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/?p=54"},"modified":"2017-02-02T14:19:10","modified_gmt":"2017-02-02T14:19:10","slug":"the-rationality-of-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2016\/12\/18\/the-rationality-of-literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rationality of Literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past couple months, I have worked on developing a mission statement for one of my overarching goals \u2013 something like a \u201elife goal\u201c. Initial attempts were quite abstract, and I was greatly helped by the very considerate feedback of friends.<\/h3>\n

In the intervening weeks since those first trials, I have kept the general aim present but I have focused on it much less. Over the past several days, I have received several ideas from other sources \u2013 more or less haphazardly, which have motivated me to reconsider this particular life goal again from a new perspective.<\/h3>\n

For people who have been following my writing for several years, it should be no surprize that literacy is really at the crux of my thinking about many topics, and also with respect to this particular life goal for which I want to craft a mission statement. One thing that has been \u201ebugging\u201c me for the past year or two is how my focus on literacy is considered by many \u2013 indeed, including myself \u2013 to be a non-human matter. In this view, reading, writing and arithmetic are technologies<\/i> and therefore lack the warmth of flesh-and-blood human beings. Code and language are inert, not living things, and they cannot ultimately provide meaning in the same way as interaction with other humans can \u2013 as humans (so this argument) we are, after all, social animals<\/i>.<\/h3>\n

This view, however, interprets technology<\/b> from a very parochial<\/i> point of view. According to this perspective, technology is merely an artefact, a curiosity, a product… albeit of human ingenuity. We pound nails not because there is anything interesting<\/i> about doing so, but merely because doing so makes our lives easier from the results<\/i> of applying such technologies. There is nothing interesting about iron or steel per se, but rather such materials are only interesting insofar as they can be manipulated into helping to make nails, just as nails are only interesting insofar as they can be used to build more things. As an aside: It might make sense to think about how the technologies we use also create threatening<\/i> things \u2013 such as global warming, nuclear waste, AIDS and\/or many other problems<\/i>.<\/h3>\n

Yet let me not drift away from the current issue \u2013 crafting my mission statement. I view language and literacy somewhat differently than most… and over the years, my thinking about these things has also undergone continued development and refinement. While I have long known (or believed) that language cannot be owned (e.g. by a monarch) or dictated (e.g. to the masses), I am now at a point where I feel it may be useful to extrapolate beyond this rather mundane and obvious fact to recognize a \u201erationality of literacy\u201c, in which people make a rational decision to engage with each other via linguistic technologies. In this vein, literacy is also not simply owned or attained, but rather it is practiced (or \u2013 in the case of illiteracy<\/i> \u2013 not<\/i> practiced).<\/h3>\n

This is important because it redirects our attention away from the ownership of resources to the actual use of such resources. To give a concrete example: In order to engage with \u201ecars\u201c, it is not necessary to own cars. Engagement with cars can also happen when someone references cars. Statements like \u201ecars are good\u201c or \u201ecars are bad\u201c are social<\/i> expressions insofar as there is agreement within a society regarding what these words (and expressions) mean.<\/h3>\n

Likewise, our level of engagement with a topic can be as small or as large as our involvement with various other social institutions related to that topic. We might simply talk about cars with very little engagement, or we might become much more involved with cars by joining organizations that deal with them and associated technologies. Our involvement with \u201ecars\u201c may lead us to become involved with \u201epedestrians\u201c, \u201estreets\u201c, \u201eroads\u201c, \u201ehighways\u201c, \u201einfrastructure\u201c, \u201epollution\u201c, \u201eglobal warming\u201c and many other topics, too.<\/h3>\n

We do not need to become dictators in any of these arenas. It is completely sufficient to simply engage \u2013 to participate in the social construction of the reality related to each of these terms. It ought to be quite plain to see that the reality we thereby create in one arena might not be the exact same reality created in another arena. There might be nuanced differences, but there might also be meaningful relationships between and among the various arenas.<\/h3>\n

Increased engagement in more and more arenas goes hand in hand with increased literacy. These two phenomena are crucially related: You cannot have one without the other (that is, at least, a hypothesis I am venturing here).<\/h3>\n

This thinking is what leads me to venture that the mission statement I need probably goes something like: My mission is to promote literacy \u2013 in order to increase community engagement and social cohesion, and also in order to motivate humans more towards alignment and harmony with natural evolution.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past couple months, I have worked on developing a mission statement for one of my overarching goals \u2013 something like a \u201elife goal\u201c. Initial attempts were quite abstract, and I was greatly helped by the very considerate feedback … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[313],"tags":[168,222,275,223,44,43,195,196,21,45,163,273,274,24,224,226,150],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9w79D-S","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2016\/07\/23\/anti-dis-establishment-arian-ism-antidisintermediation\/","url_meta":{"origin":54,"position":0},"title":"Anti-Dis-Establishment-Arian-Ism + AntiDisInterMediaTion","author":"nmw","date":"July 23, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"In this post, I plan to give you a small insight into some of the marketing \/ branding ideas I developed for this blog. One of the BIG IDEA moments behind \u201eremediary\u201c is simply that antidisintermediation is nothing other than remediation (and as that is in a rather oblique way\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "remediary"","block_context":{"text":"remediary","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/topicat\/com\/com-remediary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":34,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2016\/10\/30\/should-you-be-concerned-about-the-rate-of-literacy-if-over-99-are-illiterate\/","url_meta":{"origin":54,"position":1},"title":"Should You be Concerned about the Rate of Literacy if Over 99% Are Illiterate?","author":"nmw","date":"October 30, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When people were living in caves, probably most of them didn't create cave paintings. Certainly none of them spoke English \u2013 and the alphabet hadn't even been invented yet. The rate of literacy was without the shadow of a doubt 0%. But they managed to stay alive nonetheless. Today, people\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "remediary"","block_context":{"text":"remediary","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/topicat\/com\/com-remediary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":80,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2017\/05\/20\/reading-writing-communications\/","url_meta":{"origin":54,"position":2},"title":"Reading, Writing + Communications","author":"nmw","date":"May 20, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Five centuries ago (more or less, depending on when you actually read this), Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the church door. In the weeks, months and years that followed, one of the most influential publications of the Protestant Reformation was propagated across Europe. Yet, in my opinion,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "impost"","block_context":{"text":"impost","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/topicat\/org\/org-impost\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":252,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2021\/11\/28\/a-brief-history-of-the-gradual-shift-from-submission-censorship-towards-self-publishing\/","url_meta":{"origin":54,"position":3},"title":"A Brief History of the Gradual Shift from Submission Censorship towards Self Publishing","author":"nmw","date":"November 28, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"One of my friends who has enough patience to patiently listen to my own long-winded diatribes into various affairs in the realms of such sophisticated topics as literacy, economics or even the conditions of life in general (yet who will also occasionally interject and pepper my arguments with opinionated remarks\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "remediary"","block_context":{"text":"remediary","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/topicat\/com\/com-remediary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":23,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2016\/09\/12\/the-rationality-of-buzz\/","url_meta":{"origin":54,"position":4},"title":"The Rationality of Buzz","author":"nmw","date":"September 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"It's early on a Monday morning \u2013 I would say \u201cbright and early\u201d, but it's so early that the sun is still nowhere in sight. At any rate, the week is about to begin and so I figure it's a good time to think about the barrage of buzz that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "remediary"","block_context":{"text":"remediary","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/topicat\/com\/com-remediary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":72,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2017\/05\/02\/mobile-first-is-a-special-case-of-reading-first\/","url_meta":{"origin":54,"position":5},"title":"Mobile First is a Special Case of Reading First","author":"nmw","date":"May 2, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Several years ago, there was a push towards \u201cmobile first\u201d publishing \u2013 the idea being that more and more people were using their mobile phones as their primary reading device. The optimization of web content for constraints inherent in mobile technology (be that bandwidth or limited computational resources) is something\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "impost"","block_context":{"text":"impost","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/topicat\/org\/org-impost\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}