Literacies — diversifying axes

Cyber-enthusiasts keenly present the digital revolution landscape as a force liberating the cultural resources imprisoned in the obsolete legal system stemming from the feudal ideology and in the market-political structures associated with this system. This revolution is supposed, among other things, to encourage the new media users to take on a new role of active constructors of the symbolical and material world, and to be partisans liberating the imprisoned resources. However, despite such a lofty aim, this challenge has not been taken up yet by the collective communicative imagination, still determined by the habits, consolidated in the mass culture, of reading the linear hierarchies and narrations encoded in the media technologies and in the discoursive spaces created by them. Gutenberg's imagination copes poorly with the rhizomatic and fluid structures of digital databases. It feels secure only when it has a chance to recognize familiar shapes in them. On the one hand, as it has already been mentioned, this is the natural course of events -- because we can cope with the new forms only through analogies and antilogies with the older forms. On the other hand, however, distance which ensures safety and comfort prevents the disclosure of what is really promising and attractive in the new media. Travelling in digital spaces, we imitate gestures and cognitive schemes used towards books and television -- the analogue media world. For instance, in Internet we look for centrally managed storehouses of knowledge and manners of its traditional organization (web portals), and we operate applications and software within the framework of the menu and scripts provided by their authors. Despite unrestricted opportunities for moving in this space, free from hierarchical regulations, we predominantly decide to apply well-tried solutions. Out of the hundreds of millions of available sites, we choose the ones most frequently visited by others (the majority of Internet traffic is centred around several percent of the most popular web portals), and out of the millions of paths the best-trodden and the best marked ones are also the most frequented ones (access through search engines or relevant software, positioning).

Borderland of literacies: info-aesthetics

So far, I have discussed the general phenomena, difficult to capture with traditional methods of analysis based on media science and culture studies. I have delved under the surface fluctuations emerging at the borderline of culture, media, social life and technological development, with the intention of finding general cracks and shifts. The thesis about communicative imagination during reconstruction in the context of the ontic doubling of the technology culture and the literacies stemming from it needs further exploration. I resort to the specific, hybrid media forms described as information design or visualization/aesthetization of data. This media activity utilizes the visual aesthetics and graphic user interfaces, dominant in the popular use nowadays, and turns them into a language of expression illustrating digital databases, formally complicated, multidimensional and abundant in information. In this case, to visualize means to give an attractive shape, comprehensible in the iconic language, to sequences of digital code, algorithms and operating systems working on them, to design and picture information. As a result, enormous databases take on aesthetic forms and interfaces of maps, cartoons, interactive animated figures and colourful collages. At the same time, these databases, subjected to visual processing, do not lose their mathematical precision and ability be questioned -- it is possible to get answers to algorithmic and interface queries from them with ease, to alter the existing parameters and to compose new ones. The databases, asked questions by means of visual manipulations, offer precise answers about e.g. value of shares in a given period, or tendencies regarding historical popularity growth of particular politicians. At the same time, they do not lose anything of their visually intriguing form and they perfectly fulfil the function of modern elements of interior design (see for example www. visualcomplexity.com).

The traditional hardware of technology overlaps with software and interfaces in the technological format and functional strategies of info-aesthetics. Visualizations of databases do not exist without hardware frames displaying them, but at the same time they become for them a unique interface, managed according to the grammar of specific software. Furthermore, they are a perfect, interactive and fluid visual message but also an entity to which any interface variant is not assigned permanently -- just like algorithms inside them are subject to programming and hence they change the final shape of the medium, an interface is also in constant motion and is open to consecutive functional versions joining or replacing it. In this sense, info-aesthetics is a post-media entity, soft and fluid. However, it is also practised as a static message which demands decoding and reading in accordance with Gutenberg's rules -- it can be a book for a passive user. Only when clicked, it becomes work-in-progress, a happening, a live act and a remix.

The competences necessary to create such new media entities are based on the spheres identified within the framework of modernity: arts and technology, design and programming. Similar resources should be applied to read/use them. Their full potential is disclosed only to those who are capable of their proper technical programming. Moreover, they can be personalized in the aesthetic sense, and then knowledge and skills from the area of aesthetics, broadly speaking: culture, will be useful. With respect to digital visualities, two orders of imagination and two cultures of technology overlap and cross. This database practice combines the analogue logic of visual culture juxtaposed with the rhizomatic structure of digital databases; interface sensitivity typical of fluid digital post-mediality with a need for a story and for aesthetization of digital worlds which has its source in the analogue culture order; Gutenberg's narration with the rhizomatic openness to digital remix and update. Hence, this is both a technological-cultural hybrid and a condition which demands hybrid interdisciplinary competences and knowledge.

Conclusion

In these and similar hybrid circumstances -- visual, audio, database, network, connected with code and protocols -- the old literacy merges with the germs of the new one. The existing media culture formats converge with the fluid interfaces of digitality technology under construction; communicative imaginations and competences together with the resultant narrative and passive media strategies of addressees-readers are replaced by the logic of clicking and menu management, programming and remixing; while consumers, entrapped in the mechanisms of the cultural industry and the mass media, become emancipated taking on the roles of co-creators, prosumers, programmers and interactors.

Having left Gutenberg's territories in favour of the digital and network culture, we find ourselves on an unfamiliar ground and have at our disposal primarily the old, traditional maps and images. Accustomed to the analogue rules by the force of momentum, we try to colonize the new world and to make it familiar according to these rules, slowly and intuitively. However, the presence and scope of the technological change and the new communication continent created by it requires that communicative scenarios and rules, capacities and rights should be written anew, just like the media themselves have been rewritten according to the changed paradigms -- their grammar, forms and place within the world. The changes taking place in this way refer to the major cultural choices: how we perceive, understand and create reality, how we communicate with each other and with the world. This is a special moment for the history of communication and the media in the last several hundred years. For the first time we have an opportunity, not only as individuals but also as communities, to define in the “real time” the directions of development of the media technologies, to give them shape and define their social meanings; to program not only the media but also our imagination in contact with them. In the context of such circumstances, we need a discoursive, interdisciplinary and educational effort so that the mediamorphoses going on should not become the arena of events with respect to which we will again have the role of mere observers and consumers, just as in the case of the mass media. The growing digital and network communication technologies need culturally mature, that is thinking critically and having necessary cognitive distance, active users, societies and cultures. Going beyond Gutenberg's mediations and analogue literacy is one of the most important challenges and tasks for the world of culture and knowledge institutions today and one of the most significant fields of reflection and action within the culture of knowledge.

References

1. Adorno, T.W., Horkheimer, M. (2016). Dialectic of enlightenment. London: Verso.

2. Appadurai, A. (2010). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

3. Barthes, R. (1977). Image-music-text: Roland Barthes. Glasgow: Collins.

4. Bourdieu, P (2015). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

5. Castells, M. (2002). The Internet galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, business, and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6. Celinski, P. (2010). Interfejsy: Cyfrowe technologie w komunikowaniu. Wroclaw: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej.

7. Celinski, P., Hudzik, J.P. (2012). Kultura wiedzy. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego.

8. Giedion, S. (2013). Mechanization takes command: A contribution to anonymous history. New York: Oxford University Press.

9. Lunenfeld, P (2011). The secret war between downloading and uploading: Tales of the computer as culture machine. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

10. Manovich, L. (2016). Software takes command. New York: Bloomsbury.

11. Ong, W.J. (2009). Osoba, swiadomosc, komunikacja: Antologia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

12. Polanyi, M. (2013). The tacit dimension. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press.

13. Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly. New York: Knopf.

14. Schiller, H.J. (1973). The mind managers. Boston: Beacon.

15. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

16. Toffler, A. (1990). The third wave. New York: Bantam Books.

17. Visual complexity [Web-site]. (n. d.). Retrieved from www.visualcomplexity.com.

Размещено на Allbest.ru