Reading Response 2: All About My Girls

What is happening with my two little girls, in my perspective, is the embodiment of the discussions in each of our articles this week. I have a six year old (well, on Thursday) who loves the Wii and enjoys PBS kids on the computer. I have a three year old who can sit on the computer and play on Nick Jr. for hours, or switch between Nick Jr. and Starfall for an equal amount of time. My oldest, Lilly, cannot yet read. At least, she knows her letters (relatively well – R and K pose problems for her) and can sometimes sound out words (when she is willing to try). My youngest, Coralie, knows her letters really well – partially from working with her parents and partially from learning on Starfall – but is only beginning to work with sounds of letters. But, when Kress talks about multimodality, and expresses that the visual itself has an inherent “literacy” that semiotics tends to forget or leave as secondary, I know what he’s talking about.

My children don’t come to me and ask me to navigate web pages. When they were both two years old I sat down with them on their websites of choice and taught them to move the mouse and click it. I can still recall Coralie’s gasp of surprise when I showed her that when she moved the mouse, the arrow moved on the screen, and when I left-clicked on the green arrow in the bottom right-hand that says, “Play” the screen changed – she was instantly hooked. That’s literally all it took. And, all she has is the visual cues to “read” and understand. Lilly is the same way. When she’s playing a Wii game that has some words and she wants to know what the characters are saying, she will ask me, but otherwise, she has it down pretty well when something is intimating “OK” or “Yes” or “Continue” simply because she has mastered the visual messages on the screen without knowing what the written words actually say (she has, however, learned from playing video games what “yes” and “no” and “OK” look like and can identify them outside of the on-screen messages). To me, this is what Kress is trying desperately to help the literacy world understand: pictures have just as much valid language as spoken or written language. For all intents and purposes, my girls can "read" their media.

Now, I do not know if I’m doing everything as well as I should. I try and participate (as much as time allows) with my girls in their digital/media/internet experiences but I do hope that some of what Alisha and I do today will be as beneficial to their future growth as Seiter talks about with pianos and media: you have to start young. I know that I learned a great deal about things I need to do in the future from Livingstone’s essay. I will not continue and bore you with more discussion of my daughters (I’m getting a little long for the general post) but I do want to say that the idea of converging audio/visual, digital, information literacy is something I am tremendously interested in understanding how to do. Also, I would add that I love Seiter’s decidedly “pessimistic essay,” and it was engaging to read – not because of her semi-cynicism but because she really clicked with me (because she realistically posed the challenges while maintaining what I felt was a degree of hope) and, in the end, I love the following statement:

I am pessimistic about long-term effects on public education of the vast concentration of wealth at the top that has accompanied the digital revolution, the unprecedented concentration of media ownership, and the shift of power from the public realm to that of private corporations (49).