about postliteracy.org  

postliteracy.org explores visual, interactive, computational and textual literacies. Each week postliteracy.org presents visitors with a single image, which will often have multiple layers of meaning in its visual content. Embedded within that image, though, is textual content hidden through steganography. The audience must decode the hidden text (we recomend running images through these online tools) in order to "read" the entire message.

Thus, each post at postliteracy.org requires polymodal literacy - here, visual, interactive, computational, and textual literacies - to decode its full meaning. The hidden text may be an observation, a joke, or even application code. Each image is a multilevel, recursive puzzle for you to solve.

postliteracy.org is a response to the relationship that people in the twenty-first century have to literacy and shifting modes of communication. The Web has evolved from a text-based technology to one focused on graphic display and visual layout. Multimedia content largely privileges visual over verbal content.

Yet for all the watching and listening we do online, text continues to underline our Internet experience. People say they "don't read" - while they check email, peruse blogs, text friends. The rise of digital media has coincided with record books sales, but also record closings of independant booksellers. PowerPoint is treated like the digital equivalent of a slide-show, yet text so dominates the average PPT that Edward Tufte has taken it on as a personal crusade.

"Literacy" can encompases multiple communication technologies. It includes legacy media like written text and visual communication. But it now extends to computational and interactive literacy. Using digital technologies like the Web requires familiarity with interactive models, while understanding how those technologies operate requires familiarity with computational processes and structures. But eventually these technologies, too, rely on text to function and to perpetuate themselves.

What does it mean to be post-literate?



All Contents Copyright © 2008 postliteracy.org