Miles, Adrian. “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge.” Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24–30.

Gonna start off with a rather irrelevant comment but I’m a pretty big fan of the fact that many of the prescribed readings for this course are authored by the (un)lecturer Adrian. I can’t pinpoint why but far out I absolutely love that he regularly plugs his own work. By no means am I mocking or criticising this, I really genuinely appreciate his writing.

Anyway, on a more important and beneficial note I suppose a collection of thoughts on this reading should be shared.

I found that it simply reiterated what was proposed during week 2’s symposium, the concepts discussed about our unconscious processing of books and the likes. Print literacy as a whole is a concept I’ve certainly taken for granted up until this moment. Yet it makes a whole lot of sense and I’m left wondering why I’m 18 and only just starting to learn about this kind of thing, why it’s only just been brought to my attention. This stuff is important. I reckon it can have a huge impact on how we understand and engage with culture and print culture in particular.

As I read the chapter I felt that network literacy is a whole bigger can of worms that that of print literacy. Perhaps because that’s so foreign to me, and print literacy is easy to grasp since I have grown up with it. I feel there are so many more issues and factors that influence network literacy and the way that it’s an ever-expanding web. However in saying that I guess that doesn’t really change what it means to be network literate. In summary I think it would only be fair to say that my thoughts and ideas about this will continue to grow over this semester as we tackle this concept week by week.