{"id":80,"date":"2017-05-20T19:03:38","date_gmt":"2017-05-20T19:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/?p=80"},"modified":"2017-05-20T19:07:14","modified_gmt":"2017-05-20T19:07:14","slug":"reading-writing-communications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2017\/05\/20\/reading-writing-communications\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading, Writing + Communications"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/h3>\n

Yet, in my opinion, perhaps the most influential contribution Martin Luther made to western civilization was something quite different. He laid the foundation for literacy in the western world.<\/h3>\n

Since Johannes Gutenburg had developed a printing press with movable type, the missing piece to a literate society was no longer simply a matter of the limited production of reading material. Luther recognized that in order for printing presses to improve the lives of people, people would need to acquire skills they had never needed before. Though he campaigned strongly for advances in literacy, and though he did help to start such advances, most of the great advances in literacy didn’t actually happen until several centuries later.<\/h3>\n

I feel as though I am also in a situation quite similar to Martin Luther’s situation. Whereas for Luther it was mainly about \u201creading literacy\u201d, for me it is also about \u201cwriting literacy\u201d and also \u201ccommunicative literacy\u201d. Writing ought to be self-explanatory. What I mean by \u201ccommunicative literacy\u201d is, I guess, something like knowing that when asking a friend to meet for coffee in half an hour, it may be best to use a telephone call, maybe to send an SMS \/ instant message, but that writing an email would probably be the wrong technology, and sending snail-mail or writing a book would be completely out of the question. All of these technologies involve both reading and writing, but only some of them are adequate to the task at hand.<\/h3>\n

Few people are aware that many technologies they use on a daily basis involve writing (and thereby data being recorded). When people press someone’s telephone number into a phone, they usually don’t consider that act to be writing per se. Likewise, most people consider the sound that comes out of a telephone speaker to be the other person’s actual voice rather than a reconstruction of the audio signal that was recorded via the other person’s telephone microphone. And yet again, when someone moves a computer’s cursor using a \u201cmouse\u201d , or when they click on a button or link online, most people do not consider such actions to be writing and\/or recording data. Indeed, few people are even aware that a mouse is normally referred to as an \u201cinput device\u201d (as is a keyboard).<\/h3>\n

Much in the same way that the vast majority of Europe’s population was illiterate during Luther’s times, today the vast majority of populations worldwide are by and large oblivious with respect to many \u201cinformation and communications technology\u201d (ICT). And even though I have already written a lot, all of this is probably still less than just the proverbial \u201ctip of the iceberg\u201d.<\/h3>\n

Most people still don’t know the difference between \u201cmachine-readable\u201d data and \u201cnon-machine-readable\u201d data, most people still do not understand the difference between quantitative and qualitative data, and most people still even to this day<\/em> cannot tell how to identify who is responsible for the content that gets published online.<\/h3>\n

Most adults in developed countries today learned some basic fundamentals in school about how the publishing industry in the world they were growing up in worked. In contrast, kids today learn very little about how publishing works in the world they are growing up in now. Ask any teenager whether the device they have in their pants is currently publishing anything online (or \u201cvia the Internet\u201d), and most of them would probably just look baffled.<\/h3>\n

We can do better, and we must<\/em> do better!<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … 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":[327],"tags":[384,379,19,91,374,201,48,375,378,377,21,45,46,22,47,25,26,28,382,383,336,376,385,388,386,387,150,373,380,381,338],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9w79D-1i","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":54,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2016\/12\/18\/the-rationality-of-literacy\/","url_meta":{"origin":80,"position":0},"title":"The Rationality of Literacy","author":"nmw","date":"December 18, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"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. In the intervening weeks since those first trials,\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":80,"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":8,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2016\/07\/23\/anti-dis-establishment-arian-ism-antidisintermediation\/","url_meta":{"origin":80,"position":2},"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":72,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2017\/05\/02\/mobile-first-is-a-special-case-of-reading-first\/","url_meta":{"origin":80,"position":3},"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":[]},{"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":80,"position":4},"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":206,"url":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/2020\/02\/27\/patronizing-patrons-outside-your-own-community-vs-being-a-patron-inside-your-own-community\/","url_meta":{"origin":80,"position":5},"title":"Patronizing Patrons Outside Your Own Community vs. Being a Patron Inside Your Own Community","author":"nmw","date":"February 27, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"One of my good friends (the kind that actually try to push back on the kinds of things I often say) has been hammering away for some time at my attitude \u2013 sort of calling it patronizing. I beg to differ. But before I address that, let me note something\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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80"}],"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=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pro.freezine.org\/remediary0com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}