ENG 3080J
Essay 2: Digital Literacy Analysis
Modern literacy is more than reading and writing print-text. It now includes
modern technology and writing along with images, video, and sound. The
reproduction and Photoshopping of images such as “casual pepper-spraying”
offers us new possibilities for public reactions to institutional or social oppression.
We will explore the casual pepper-spray meme, the Twitter campaigns and
associated literacy events connected to the Schlossberg incident, and how these
events and the variety of texts surrounding them relate to Barton and Hamilton’s
six propositions of about the nature of literacy. Writers like Buckingham will
familiarize us with frameworks for analyzing web sites/texts.
The value of B and H’s list of characteristics of literacy and Buckingham’s
conceptual aspects is that we begin to see texts not as sterile individual items
devoid of social context, but as intertwined with a whole social system, where
different agents chose different practices with different benefits and limitations, for
different purposes, to engage with other agents, as part of a bigger loosely
organized conglomeration of varying power plays. Considering literacy this way can
allow us a deeper understanding of the rhetoric we can employ as literate
individuals and a deeper understanding of the power literacy plays in high stakes
situations…the impact you can have on the world.
Your essay should:
• Open with an engaging introduction that ends with a thesis
statement.
• Provide context on your theoretical framework. Work with Barton and
Hamilton OR Buckingham. Identify and define keywords, possibly with
examples. Language you establish here should be used throughout
your paper. For Barton and Hamilton, you should include some of the
propositions of literacy. For Buckingham, you should include some of
the four conceptual aspects of media literacy.
• Provide context on the subject/texts you are going to apply the
theoretical framework to in order to understand.
• Systematically analyze your subject/texts with elements from the
theoretical framework.
• Arrive at a conclusion that includes language from the thesis
statement and answers the question “So, what?”
• Use MLA style for in-text citation and a Works Cited page.
