RB, Poster

Is virtual literacy as empowering as literacy? According to Mark Poster, in order to answer that question, the first thing I need to do is reword the question. “Virtual literacy” is a term I just made up in order to compare its signified meaning, Internet proficiency, to a referential signifier, literacy. The referential signifier literacy is, inadvertently, the problem. Literacy is a term that applies to print; the signified “Internet proficiency” is held back by the signifier “virtual literacy” because literacy refers to an entirely different form of communication than the technological communication to which “Internet proficiency” refers.

Poster writes, “The understanding of [technological] communications is limited by modern categories of analysis” (541). Poster is writing about the signifier “virtual communities,” used to describe groups of people who meet on the Internet. The term suggests it is an alternative to the real thing. This is a misnomer. “Real community . . . presupposes the fixed, stable identities of its members, the exact assumption that Internet communities put into question” (542).

Is Internet proficiency as empowering as literacy? Poster talks about the Internet’s potential to usher in the “second media age,” which would advance us from a media age that began with printed news. Print and the Internet each has given us power and freedom unprecedented before its creation. However, the potential for the “second media age” is conceivably threatened, according to Poster, by restrictions of information similar to those in TV. Censorship and greed abound, but it's hard to make people forget how to read. And it's even harder to pull them away from a brightly lit screen. The “second media age” is here.