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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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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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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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.

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