The Only History of Literacy Paper That Could Ever Move Me

While Deb Brandt's "Accumulating Literacy" does a serviceable job of tracing the growth of literacy and the means by which it happened as well as what it meant during the 20th century, where she gets big points from me is for familiarizing me with Dorothy Smith's concept of DOCUMENTARY REALITY-- " so much of what passes for raw data has already been processed socially organized systems of recording and recording."

I agree with Smith and am interested in reading more about her ideas. The idea of filtered reality ascending to become so much the dominant reality that its very filtered-ness becomes unperceived is one of the concepts I'm interested in both in my fiction and in the classroom (In the first Argument and Research classes I taught I forced everyone to write on the cover of their notebooks "Facts all come with points of view"--Talking Heads.)

One of the exercises I used to help students understand this was to look at current event from four or five different points of view on the political spectrum. Today's health care bill passage would work. What's actually happening is largely up for debate. News aggregators like Drudge even work for the exercise-- what narrative is being pushed here.

As our media become fragmented the problem becomes more complex and potentially more insidious.