Literacy, Culture, and Creativity in a Digital Era

Abstract

Changing constructions of literacy in online contexts are situating reading and writing within everyday and popular culture activities while also facilitating highly specialized literate and creative activity. I define these two types of literacy as “little-l” literacy and “Big-L” literacy, drawing on distinctions of “Big-C” versus “little-c” culture and creativity, and then show how digital environments are changing writing space and creating new literacies of a third kind. The effects of electronic technologies on the processes and products of literacy, culture, and creativity require a rethinking of traditional views of culture and creativity to bring them up-to-date in the digital era, with implications for pedagogy.

Authoring Online

“…Scholarly debates have also acknowledged the ways in which the expansion of the internet ushers in new landscapes under which authorship functions. In literacy studies, for instance, scholars have pointed out the expansion of digital literacy leading to an understanding of creativity as a common phenomenon, rather than an exclusive trait of Romantic authors (Pennington, 2017). Researchers of digital writing also underline how the internet has turned a reading-dominant culture into a writing-dominant one, lowering the threshold of becoming a published author.…”