Talking to people who have no knowledge of and/or hostility towards socialnets and cloud computing I feel like I did when I was hiding by a sewage lagoon as a kid to avoid mulletted Tammy Gough who promised to break my neck because of my Smart Set peach satin pirate shirt, chicken legs and granny boots.

There is no utterable translation of my position. Despite being physically proximal our cultures seem uncomfortably divergent. I’ve learned, thanks to the Goughster and her threats, to pass. To engage in idle chitchat about raccoons ripping apart my roof and lawn maintenance. To shut my mouth when someone asks what the hell is the big deal about iPhones or, nostalgic yearnings for the good old days when kids had attention spans and thinner bodies because they never had any Internet.

In my head I scream (and later Tweet): would they lament the invention of the printing press in the same way?

The Internet isn’t about reading less or more. It is a current functional part of literacy. Reading has exceeded the written page. Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities have mashedup against Saskia Sassen’s dematerialized global technological infrastructures. In other words, like Shannon Doherty playing the Joker in the next Batman sequel. Books on identity politics have to get painstakingly rewritten. Again.

Perpetually, literacy is made of relationships. In a historicized cultural context, literacy can be understood a relationship between privilege and oppression. The logic of this relationship is underpinned by centuries of physical and economic violence, rendering literacy culturally inaccessible to most the world’s people.

Current iterations of literacy are, of course, not excluded from the pattern. Access to the Internet is a privilege. It has an economic and cultural cost only a privileged few can pay. It is not a new literacy or a niche form of ‘internet literacy,’  but rather an exegesis of literacy in general that makes more clear patterns within culture and economics: So-called “new” cultural formations develop, tensions between new and old formations function to obscure global reproductions of relations of power and, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, so on and so on.

It can all play out here, online. We can reflect on instead of react to how repetitive we are being.

So let’s cut the bullshit, blog reader. You and me—begrudging Internet user or Jobsian acolyte—are all on the same, privileged side. I’ll stop wasting my energy pretending to be illiterate if you’ll stop wasting yours trying to stay that way.

Just imagine what all our re-directed energies might accomplish.

Tags: benedict anderson, doherty 90210, imagined communities, printing press, saskia sassen

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Posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.