Experience Design

Becoming Screen Literate

By Kevin Kelly

Published: November 21, 2008

Kevin Kelly is senior maverick at Wired and the author of “Out of Control” and a coming book on what technology wants.

In the New York Times article Kevin Kelly lays out the arguement that culture is under going a paradigm shift.

“Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.” Kevin Kelly

The ubiquity of screens is a force that is undisputable.  The iphone alone sold 21.17 million in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone). Now the access to screens and networked technology has unearthed a vast and unwealdy beast that has left entrenched media gasping for air. With many companies opting for abandoning ship rather then shifting or recognizing a location for improvement or cohabidance.

Capitalism thrives on competition and what better competition then between paradigms right?  Kevin Kelly coments that in the age of computation we have entered that age of screen fluency, this in fact may be true but the line of thinking that book knowledge and screen knowledge or mutually exclusive undermines the ability of screen literacy to convey meaning. Oral culture may have been commodified by the literature and literature may be commodified by the motion picture and motion pictures may be commodified by screen and software but they are all connected. The separation from media type to media type is not fundimentally different. The two paradigms share the ability to convey knowledge through metaphor, storytelling and emotion.  The difference is the speed and experience of that media.

Books are slow, pragmatic, (sometimes) linear and require exisiting visual experience to impact the narrative and comprehension, while screens are fast, hyper-linked, variable and use visual experience to impact.  Books are quiet and blind, while screens are hyper and loud.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook