The Land of Literacy: A Tale of Two Cities

Welcome to the land of Literacy. There you will find the village of Technophobia. It is just across the digital divide from Technophilia, a city that has been trying to have a meaningful partnership with it for decades. The people of Technophilia don’t necessarily want to annex Technophobia (although some are pretty militant promoters of that particular cause); they just want to get to know them and their ways, have their own culture understood in return, maybe help them file their taxes online. The residents of Technophobia (we’ll call them T-phobes, for short) have mixed feelings about this. Some T-phobes are considering opening talks and have reached out to the representatives of Technophilia (the T-philes), but others are hunkering down and refusing to even accept communication. They have sent letters to the editor decrying the attempts at partnerships, and they have organized poorly-attended rallies (by word of mouth) at the village hall. The T-phobes who are open to the possibility often have relatives who have moved to Technophilia and have seen the kind of lifestyle they are living there. While they are sometimes quite comfortable where they are and have been doing just fine, some of them yearn for more consistent, meaningful contact with their T-phile friends and family. The divide is so great, however, that they sometimes feel like they’re speaking a foreign language instead of just a different dialect. Some T-philes feel the same way. “Let them STAY in the Dark Ages!” they rant on their blogs and in the chat rooms. “If they don’t want to advance, I’ll gladly take the jobs they’re missing out on!” And, “ If Grandma wants to talk to ME, she’d better get on Facebook!”

Some of the leaders of the two municipalities have come up with a tentative arrangement, however. Since the children of the two share the same schools, the educational leaders have decided to write curriculum that addresses both cultures’ needs and desires, and to teach the _whole_ curriculum to the entire student body. T-phobes will join their T-phile counterparts in classes in keyboarding, visual media, and social networking. T-philes will learn the arts of letter writing, conversation, and the classics alongside their T-phobe peers. They’ll mix with one another in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, and in the cafeteria. They’ll talk about what their homes are like and listen when others are talking. Then they’ll go home and tell their parents about what they learned. Some of the parents will be intrigued and want to know more. Some will tentatively ask their children to teach them what they’re doing, just so that they can have something that they are learning together with their kids. Some will make arrangements to meet their kids’ friends’ parents and maybe have them over for dinner. Some might be skeptical at first but change their minds as they see their children working with the “foreign” culture, and will begin making rudimentary attempts to create a back-and-forth dialog that will enrich each culture through the understanding of the other.

Some from each side, however, will deride what they hear about the other camp, condemning it as “a fad” or “old-fashioned,” depending on their town affiliations, and they’ll force the divide even further, making any chance at cooperation or even coexistence seem nearly impossible. Sadly, some will never learn to appreciate or understand the cultures of others. Some T-philes will continue to mock the T-phobes who can’t tell a database from a Web page instead of helping someone find a good, peer-reviewed source of professional information. Some T-phobes will continue to shun the T-philes’ attempts to communicate instead of writing a lovely note to thank them for the virtual flowers they tried to send (but didn’t arrive because the T-phobe accidentally deleted the email).

I know people from each of these places, and they are sometimes quite wary of one another. Sometimes they’re ashamed to admit where they come from, what their roots are, what their passions entail. However, people of every place and every literacy have something to share with each other. Learning media literacy does not mean abandoning print. Loving print does not mean shunning visual or other “new” media. Cross-generational, cross-cultural, cross-communicational outreach and a showing of mutual respect for ideas--new and old--is going to be the only way to bring T-phobes and T-philes together. Let the library be the place where they learn to appreciate one another!