Essential to Digital Literacy
Prescripts of templates influence the creation process and the finished work in (at least) three ways. Prescripts
- limit the means of expression (interface prescripts),
- add meanings in another sign system (design prescripts), and
- tie the text to a genre (genre prescripts).
I argued in the previous section that these kinds of influences are new with computers, and I hope to have demonstrated that one important part of teaching digital literacy is to teach students to be attentive to the prescripts of authoring software.
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Authoring with templates is part of a larger trend. Communication in Western culture is becoming increasingly visual, and increasingly digital (see, for example, Kress and van Leeuwen
. Many have noted the need for a new digital literacy in the general audience, meaning more than teaching Microsoft Office in schools. A digital literacy will have many parts, and I have argued here that one part of digital literacy is attention to the software's prescripts. A digital literate knows that there are prescripts in software, and that it is necessary and practical. But she or he also knows that the prescript has its limits, and that other prescripts are possible.
Computer scientists are taught this as they learn how to code in programming languages, but they are also taught how to assemble programs from existing routines, methods, libraries, and classes. Now, the layperson also needs to learn about prescripts.
Students need to be taught that when they find it difficult to create something, it is often the prescripts that hinder them and not their own lack of skills. Much of what we think of as "computer literacy," "experience," or "expertise" is in fact experience in working around the prescripts in a template.
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Students of computer communication should be aware that computer templates result in a new and different relation between an author and the genre in which he or she creates.
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Computer education relies on concepts that will help authors communicate effectively with that technology. One such concept is genre. When discussing genre prescript above, I noted that computer templates imply a different relation between an author and the genre in which he or she creates. An author in an authoring system does not solely recreate a genre--much of it is recreated already and may not be escaped. This has some implications for genre study in computer literature, computer media, and computer art. To understand a genre in this medium it will often be necessary to understand the tools with which the texts are created.
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Many genres cannot be fully understood as relations between texts or relations between authors, texts and audiences. They should be viewed as more complex relations between creators, texts, audiences, various technologies for creation and consumption, and the makers of those technologies.
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The role of technology in media communication is not always sufficiently theorized. Whoever argues that technology plays a formative role will often be criticized for being a "technological determinist," a position it is easy to denounce in theory, but hard to avoid in the kinds of studies I am discussing in this paper.
In a recent paper, Simeon Yates
has discussed how different approaches of "Internet Research" address technology in different ways. What is common is that most research leaves out aspects of Internet technology (always a social construction), and Yates argues that most research will have to "bracket out" some aspects of technology to avoid overly complex analyses. This is a timely reminder. It seems futile to discuss the social history of the Internet, the Web and Blogger every time one discusses blogs. Still I will argue, and this is also what Yates wants to stress, that the researcher must make a conscious decision about what he or she brackets out in every study.
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Scholars need a way to discuss how available technology plays a role in text production and genre formation without either resorting to technological determinism or having to devote most of the study to the social construction of the technology in question. The concept of prescripts is presented here as a possible solution. It is a textual concept, yet it focuses on the parts of a text that are written by a technological system.