Digital literacies: Cultural Background

According to Pandey, in "Literate Lives Across the Digital Divide", literacy learning is being overlapped with the larger political realm (246). In this article, he argues fervently how understanding cultural backgrounds is essential to helps teachers understand the literacy practices of students and writers (246). He does make a great point about digital literacies when he states that the western culture has made assumptions about technological difficulties. These assumptions include politics, language, and wealth as the driving forces that supposedly make up technological literacies. What more can be added when the majority's voices are heard and imposed on everyone's ideology? The non-dominant minority even when they do speak will, nevertheless, not be heard. The more I think about cultural backgrounds, and how I can be an influence to student/writers when creating papers, I realize how my own technological literacy is embedded with negotiations. Unlike the author, who was born into one of the world’s poorest countries, where educational literacies are politicized and used to coerce and control people, my upbringing was in the western culture—dreamland and the "land of opportunity" to most of the other countries. However, as Pandey argues, he finds himself shifting from one "cultural space and technology to another", which gives me the precise words to my own way of performing technological literacies (254). What I mean to say with this is that, somehow, the performance of writing is under the guise of Panopticism and entrenched in the majority’s presumptions. I too have fallen to believe that the reason my writing is what it is today is because I lack the Dominant discourse. I was not born into the primary dominant Discourse that James Paul Gee spoke about which appeared in his published works two decades ago. I can definitely see and feel the digital divide, the cultural background along with my economic status.

Pandey quotes Debora Brant maintaining that literacies occur at a social level. In addition, Brant argues that the positioning and repositioning of emergent and recessive literacies are the changes that happen in one's literacies (254.)This point is important to consider even if it is for an instance in time because it demonstrates how my own literacy practices in the digital environment have and still do, to a certain extent, involve an ongoing negotiation. Negotiating between my cultural norms of addressing and writing to close friends versus my professors. What are the consequences of maintaining print and digital literacies in a globalized world? How does an instructor, facilitator, mentor, educator, etc. understand individual literacy practices of students/ writers in the Western world?Would the use of literacy narratives assist in understanding student/writers and aid them better in writing? Why would understanding someone’s cultural background be better than understanding a political history? Or not?

Pandey, Iswari P. "Literate Lives Across the Digital Divide." Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 246+. Science Direct. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.

#pandey #digitaldivide #digitalliteracies #technologicalliteracies