Gerben.+Privileging+the+“New”+in+New+Media+Literacy

=**Gerben, Chris. "Privileging the "New" in New Media Literacy."** = MIT (April 2009). PDF Book. []

=**Abstract** = His second paragraph in the introduction to the text:

//This paper will analyze these popular websites as possible locations of formative literacy// //practices for young users, where a literacy practice is not only physical and cognitive// //engagement with text, but also the attitudes one brings to interactions with text. I consider each// //website a “text,” where the content on each contains pieces of information, usefully defined by// //Hollingshead, Fulk, and Monge as, “[raw facts that] include context—the people, technology,// //and other organizational aspects to which the [facts] relate” (335). As some of the first websites// //that young users begin frequenting on the web, these texts are all contingent on this information// //context that relies on information being displayed according to temporal principles, where the// //“new” is valued—and prominently displayed—over information that may be more relevant,// //interesting, or important to a user. As a result, these texts are contingent upon their information’s// //context—their temporal design—that may impact how users engage with the site. This// //engagement may become a socialized norm of how to read and write within the texts, which may// //transfer into engaging with other texts, thus becoming a literacy practice both online and off.//

Argument The paper discusses that as users of internet becomes used to sorting out the huge amount of information, the writers actually compete for their attention. Attention, in the economic model, becomes the element of scarcity. In ages past, information used to be scarce, but today, it is the opposite. People are seeking attention from their users by giving them more new information; keep putting out new news; pushing yesterday's current events out of the user's mind into the new.

To keep users coming back to their sites, content creators have to keep creating new content or they lost their users' attention. It is important for content creators to know that the "newness of online content" will keep the economy in balance. If they output content at a slower rate than users expect, they will move on to a different site that will give them quicker output of content.

The new media found in this article is focused on how digital text transforms the way people think, communicate with other people. In an essence, the digital content is now the "popular culture" where the experience of a thing is shared by all members of the community.

Key Passages

[...] all three [sites] are designed according to the importance of time. Specifically, each website contains a layout that displays information in reverse chronological order, so that the newest information greets users [first...]

[...] these popular websites as possible locations of formative literacy practices for young users, where a literacy practice is not only physical and cognitive engagement with text, but also attitudes one brings to interactions with text. I consider each wesbsite a "text," where the content on each contains pieces of information, [...]

[The] information [is] being displayed according to temporal principles, where the "new" is valued--and prominently displayed--over information that may be more relevant, interesting, or important to a user.

[...] texts are contingent upon their information's context--their temporal design--that may impact how users engage with the site. This engagement may become a socialized norm of how to read and write within the texts, which may transfer into engaging with other texts, thus becoming a literacy practice both online and off.

... "versioning," an analytical frame that focuses on temporal website design where new information supercedes potentially relevant or interesting information. While newness is often favored and diplayed in many everyday interactions (e.g. print newspapers [...]), versioning takes into account that online digital texts not only privilege newness as a default design principle, but also rely on user-produced newness in order to maintain popularity.

[This paper is about] the //consumption// of text(s) on these popular websites, but acknowledges that //production// is inherently necessary for user- and community driven-websites where the lines between reading and writing are blurred by interactive options.

[The sites choesen] are open to all audiences, young and old.

... "popular culture can be understood as a 'text' that is received by people and acted on, or as a 'lived experience' that is created by people."

[I chose these sites] because of their potential to inform this "lived experience," which I believe is analogous to a later literacy practice beyond the texts studied here.

[Young users online] are earning and consuming [things] of their free will, and maintaining an outward persona, an online identity. This "age-based definition of youth" closely follows Elizabeth's Moje's view of adolescents, as well as aligns with her definition of youth literacy that are "practices and texts that young people engage in or with their own volition." These three websites represent the potential first encounters that young users will have with the same types of texts they will continue to encounter throughout adulthood.

[...]within new media studies, [...] young users may view little difference between digital and print texts for the goal of conveying information. Because of this abundance of text in multiple mediums, [...] have noted that literacy practices in the 21st century are operating within an "information economy" where information on a website is seen as both content and resource to be consumed by interested users. I am interested in how the focus on newness of online text operates within this economy, [...] and value this newness over other factors.

[...] drawing users back for repeat visits, it is in the sites' best interest to maintain new, and constantly updated, information to operate within this economy.

[...] there is a shift in popular media to not only provide more information, but to sustain users' interest, and--in effect-hold their attentions. This "attention economy" is potentially butting heads against the information economy because any successful economic model is one based on scarcity, [with more] information on the internet, "attention, unlike information, is inherently scarce."

[Text is] positioned "along the lines of writing, from top to bottom, from left to right, as well as in its simple sequential unfolding." [...] As a result, young readers are taught to value the upper-left portions of any text as they proceed down to information that follows. Websites that place new information at the top of their websites, then, inherently value newness as the entry point for [...] text, and invite users to return to the sites over time to see what new entry point awaits them [...]

Digital texts--often referred to as new media texts--often demand literacy practices that differ from "traditional" print texts in subtly different ways.

[...] "the social practices and conceptions of reading and writing," where the social practices are enacted by how users interact with texts by consuming them in a particular way, contributing to them through interactive production, and revisiting them often.

"new literacies" as analogous to "new media," with the same focus on stituated pratices Street envisioned, only occuring exclusively in digital spaces.

[...] "we can begin to relate the 'newness' of new literacies to distinctive kind of "ethos stuff' that is reaching a scale hitherto unprecedented, and turning the consumption of popular culture into active //production:// the production of consumption." While their newness maintains Street's emphasis on social practices, [...]

[...] uses of "new," and places them firmly in a changing economy of text that considers website design as integral to how text is consumed and addressed [...]

For any material good, items that are fewer in number are often more desireable (e.g. luxury.) [The same with] digital goods'--in this case, digital information's--desirability can be measured by their placement on popular websites, and how long they maintain this privileged position. [Information stays there] until the information is no longer desirable. At that time, the text is moved to the bottom of the page, and new information is given the [...] space.

Since what is "new" is always changing, constantly updated texts on websites operate within this scarcity model and confirm [....] that "information is in oversaturated supply [which] is fatal to the coherence of the idea of an information economy," so that "the basis of the coming new economy will be attention and //not// information."

[...] newness in visual design and user functionality illustrates how these sites--and other like them--may faciliate literacy practices that not only allow users to navigate the sites in question, but also other texts both online and off.

[About Facebook,] this analysis suggests that newness may affect young users' literacy practices of production in terms of feeling a need to produce new information to gain prominence [in news feeds] and popularity.

I hope that my emphasis on newness demonsrates the conscious decisions that web designers make in privileging any piece of information, and how this choice may potentially affect how users come to value information within digital texts, as well as within print texts and personal identities beyond the new media realm.

"[in 1996], Haas found that ...students began writing sooner and spent less time planning with [a] word-processor because making changes was easier with the word-processor;" a focus on time reveals how initial engagement and ease may affect literacy practices that are transferred to other practices.

Leander's assertion that "technologies are essentially social, and thus serve to constitute particular values, ideologies, preferred practices, power relations, social relations, and modes of learning" in differentiating between engagement with digital and print texts.

[...] future researchers [...] may extend this study of time to a focus on how ideas--and information--circulate within and across spaces.

Selected Works Cited Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. beck. __The Attention Economy__. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001.

Gee, James Paul. __What Video Games have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy__. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Hartley, James. "Longitudinal Studies of the Effects of New Technologies on Writing: Two Case Studies." __Writing and Cognition: Research and Applications__. Eds. Mark Torrance, Luuk van Waes and David Galbraith. vols: Elsevier, 2007. 293-305.

Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel. "Sampling 'The New' In New Literacies." __A New Literacies Sampler.__ Eds. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. vols. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2007. 1-24.

Moje, Elizabeth Birr. "Youth cultures, literacies, and identities in and out of school." __Handbook of research in teaching the communicative and visual arts.__ Eds. J. Flood, S. B. Heath, & D. Lapp. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2008. 207-219. =**Other Notes:** = He also created a video to highlight the main topics of his paper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPxSifqIUss