Open Literacy: Helen of Troy, Richard Hoggart, Phonic Wars, Greta Thunberg

Abstract

Social media and videogames are often blamed for individual behavioural delinquency, but rarely praised for cultural creativity, social innovation, or helping us to form new social groups or work through new ideas. Videogames are now a political football, both in the US (where they’re blamed for gun crime) and in China (where they’re blamed for childhood myopia). Every new media form has grown up surrounded by those wanting to control it. Popular literacy has never been free and open. Popular novels and the press; cinema and TV; and more recently digital and social media, have all attracted the wrath of incumbent commercial, government or social interests. But in the era of open access, open science, open knowledge, what about open literacy? Can it be extended to whole populations, across demographic borders, at global scale, for purposeless but nevertheless pedagogic play, and for social innovation? Or will it, like predecessor forms, be dismissed as a delinquent waste of time or commodified instrument for profit, power and mass persuasion?

Keywords

• open literacy
• partisan politics
• knowledge systems
• myth
• helen of troy
• culture wars
• richard hoggart
• purposeless play
• insurrection
• greta thunberg