Higher education discourse is clotted with a surfeit of claims made by advocates lobbying to attain the status of a literacy for the particular configuration of abilities, skills, or forms of knowledge and competency fostered within their purview. The Chronicle, to give just a few examples, has carried a “plea for spatial literacy”; an argument that “in the end, we are all poorly served by an academic community that does not promote biocultural literacy”; and a notice of major foundation support for digital-media literacy. Not surprisingly, the calls for “financial literacy” and “economic literacy” are the loudest right now. The idea, it seems, is that a literacy stands a better chance of making the list of shared goals for student learning. Depending on where they go to school, students today may be expected to achieve some level of quantitative literacy, cultural literacy, technological literacy, scientific literacy, informational literacy, statistical literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, civic literacy, digital literacy, and so on (and on, and on . . .); there’s even something called “Diaspora literacy.”

However limitless the list of literacies pressing for curricular attention may seem, it’s worth noting that this is contested ground. The Chronicle has also carried arguments against, for example, information literacy (“the wrong solution to the wrong problem”). Perhaps the best-known antiliteracy argument was made by the mathematics and computer science professor Paul De Palma in “http://www.when_is_enough_enough?.com,” a widely circulated (and cleverly titled) essay first published in the American Scholar. Yet as compelling as De Palma’s examination of “just who benefits from the computer literacy movement (and who pays for it)” may be, even he had to acknowledge that the odds don’t favor the opposition in a dispute over anything described as a literacy. “Sadly, the proponents of computer literacy have won the high ground by virtue of the term itself. Who would argue with literacy? . . . Literacy, like motherhood and apple pie in the America of my youth, is unassailable.”

The “literacy” that seems most to vex educators and students alike is the one that takes aim at the moving target of technology. Indeed, the very terms used to name this elusive yet much-coveted literacy—computer literacy, information literacy, technological literacy, digital literacy, etc., etc.—are no more stable than the knowledge, skills, competencies they’re meant to describe.

It’s within this context that one feels so grateful to those engineers who strive to develop new technologies that don’t require special new literacies, those engineers who, in effect, transfer the burden of literacy to our machines.

This gratitude was a focus of remarks made by Stephen Fry at an event held to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Macintosh computer. Fry put his finger on the characteristic genius of Apple: it makes devices that are “human literate.” With its mouse, its windows, its pull-down menus, the Macintosh offered an entirely new and intuitive way of interacting with a computer. “Rather than we, the users, having to know about it, having to be ‘computer literate,’” Fry explained, “this computer seemed to be ‘human literate.’ It was talking our language, in as much as it talked the language of metaphor, of a symbol, of a desktop.” The beauty of this new literacy, then, is that it has the potential to subtract from, rather than add to, our list of desirable literacies.

In his talk, Fry recalled an early moment in the development of the electric motor, when speculation about possible household applications took shape in futuristic depictions of the “house of the 1960s . . . with this enormous electric motor in the middle of it” driving washing machines, record players, and all kinds of devices requiring sustained motion. “They only made one mistake,” Fry noted. “Instead of one big electric motor, there were lots of little ones.” More to the point, however, this early speculation gave rise to urgent calls for electric-motor literacy. “But you don’t have to be electric-motor literate,” Fry pointed out. “And the same thing happened with computers. In the early seventies, everyone talked about computer literacy: ‘We’re going to have to have a generation of people who are computer literate.’ They were going to have to know everything about how computers are built, and how they’re made, and how they’re programmed, because that’s the only way anyone will be able to use them.” What these early advocates of computer literacy failed to anticipate, what they could not really have anticipated, were such things as the Macintosh and Windows operating systems.

The rapid pace of technological change and the unpredictable direction of technological development combine to create highly significant, if not altogether insurmountable, difficulties for any credible attempt to delimit a teachable and learnable technology-related literacy. Such a literacy is inevitably keyed to a particular moment in the development of technology and is, therefore, likely to become outmoded relatively quickly. One might even wonder, following Fry’s dismissal of “electric-motor literacy” and computer literacy, whether such a literacy would ultimately be worth the time taken to cultivate it.

Tags: learning outcomes, literacy, technology