October 30, 2006 (2): The Socially Illiterate Society

I realize that my recent attack on Henry Jenkins' Macarthur Report is not so much about "media literacy" as it is about "social literacy." It is bad enough that questions about the nature of social literacy and how it may be achieved are ignored by the media literacy camp, that seems to lose touch with what it is that media are mediating. It is more serious that they should be ignored by champions in the social software camp, such as JP Rangaswami; but what is “social literacy” if not an intuitive awareness of and sensitivity to concepts like “connectedness,” “belonging,” “sharing,” and “bonding,” which seem to figure so fundamentally in JP's rhetoric? Unfortunately, there seems to be no place for social literacy in today’s classrooms (at least in the public school system in the United States), since that is just not part of the accountability equation that the government has forced on those classrooms. Thus, the question of whether or not those classrooms have computers is ultimately a distraction from the real issue, which concerns how the next generation of pupils will be conducive to having relationships at all, whether or not those relationships are mediated by computer technology.