Key to Living in the Information Age

We are entering a new era in communications - large scale networks connect computer devices the world over to provide a totally electronic range of media whereby to communicate. Instead of speaking face to face, or reading text created on paper, we now communicate screen to screen.

Prior to Plato, people communicated face-to-face using skills of oracy as the primary method of communication. Skills of oracy were the primary skills that provided one power within the community to achieve, command respect and make way in society. Plato complained that as literate skills were being introduced into society he was losing his mind - his way of thinking and living. In fact, it was that new skills of literacy were becoming widespread that skills of oracy were being moved aside in people's habits of thinking.

As the 1990s progressed giving away to the year 2000, skills of literacy are becoming less of importance. Just as skills of oracy were required when the primary communication method was oral, and just as literate skills were required when paper communication was primary, so too now, skills are required that enable people to communicate computer-to-computer, screen-to-screen. This I termed in my PhD dissertation the skills of "Technacy".

Technacy is the key to living in the information age. These skills involve far more than the ability to operate a computer. Technacy involves using a computer to make meaning in our information society. Writing now involves writing to the screen - I composed this site using the technate skills I have acquired. Reading now involves active participation in clicking on links, understanding how sites are connected online, who is involved in each site . . . it is about meaning, making meaning in our information society.

But to be able to read and write in a technate society is to know how my everyday actions of creating, operating and maintaining writing on the screen makes sense to everyday life. What does it take to create a site to carry out my everyday activities? When one writes for a site, what are the clues I embed for my readers to interact with my site? What are the clues that I can rely on what I read and that some other things that occur are not to be relied upon? Skills of technacy are those skills of making meaning in a computer-to-computer communication world that allow people to be able to do things.

Then how does one create a site? How does one make meaning so that others can benefit? What is it that I do to enable people to enter my world and understand my position? What is it that I do to enter other people's world and make sense of their activities?

What has brought about the possibility of electronic language -- language that is composed for reading in a totally electronic environment and the understanding of which requires the skills of technacy -- is the large-scale network called the Internet. It is here that the predominant activity of coding and decoding electronic texts takes place. It is here that the skills of technacy are required to enable people to make meaning in a technate society.

And so, how is it that I can make meaning in this setting? Predominantly, the Internet is the site of sharing information worldwide. From my seat at a desktop (or laptop) I can code the information that is at my fingertips. It is here that I can invite the world to see my thoughts, decode the site on which these thoughts are displayed.

Weblogging an Example of Technate Activity

There is now a wide range of genre that can be adopted by the technate writer to encode his/her thoughts, none more efficient for the individual than the weblogs genre. Through 'weblogging' tools skills of coding and decoding are required. The greater your skill in handling textual elements in the electronic world, the greater the potential for your communication. This is a worldwide phenomenon which is uniquely an online activity; and it is specifically a genre of the individual. Although, this genre is great for individuals, there are some who are now taking the genre into mainstream business circles and using the features of weblogging to work through business issues -- see: weblog about Trellix. See some key sites where highly technate people use ordinary weblogging tools to get some phenomenal results: Analog Cereal, Garden Spot.

Weblogs are a kind of guided tour of thought published on the web. An analysis of what is required to compose weblogs and then also to read and decode the messages of weblogs provides an insight into the skills of technacy. There are many other examples of technate activity we could have chosen; however, weblogging is a great place to start in that it has many characteristics of the literate traditions of 'diary writing' and yet is made new by the fact that it is electronic, public and published. Thus, we can identify with the processes involved in composing a log, however, the differences become clear once we see the potential outcomes of our actions.

Weblogging is a complex activity requiring a person to harness the power of multiple dimensions of meaning making. First, there is the literate activity of being able to type a meaningful text, format that text and have it appear on a web page. Second, there is the building of the weblog such that it is in keeping with the chosen theme of the total number of other logs on the same site. Third, there is the need for the weblogger to link to other sites across the Internet to generate that web-ness or connectedness of the log with the world. Fourth, there is the aspect of a weblog that allows the individual to be highly personal, can produce cutting remarks, and can have a personal viewpoint as this is the composer's space and has this personal opinion as the main organizer of the site. Fifth, there are all the technical things which need to be orchestrated to add graphics, place logs in the right place on the resultant website, archives the logs so they can be found again, gives structure to the website containing the logs and can think in terms of an accretion of thought over time in both the terms of thoughts and their connectedness and the technical organization to allow that connectedness to be displayed. This requires that a person can manipulate the tools of weblogging and has the capability to think and act in the electronic medium outside of the literary and linear methods of composing and reading texts.

Let us consider the site The End of Free in terms of these points. This site is structured around the theme of the next model of content publishing on the Internet -- the fact that content publishing is now moving towards a fee based model. Each paragraph introduces information about the new model of website content publishing and provides a link to the fuller treatment of that information. The site has a coherent theme, and uses summarizing techniques to provide a 'teaser' written in a small paragraph to entice the reader to view the link to which it provides that introduction. An activity of collecting information across the Internet on other websites that has relevance. This may entail searching across the Internet for new material -- although it is likely that this material may not arrive on search engines in time to publish the weblog. Thus, it is more likely that the weblogger has a range of sites which are checked frequently for any new articles or information and when it is found, a weblog is created including the link to that new information.

The technical aspect of weblogging can be better understood through reading a tutorial instructing as to how to use a common weblogging tool with commercial software. There are little tricks of the trade -- for example, where to save one's html files and how to get them copies to the weblog publishing site. The two tools mentioned here are Radio Userland (a weblog publishing and content management tool) and Microsoft Front Page (a common commercial html editor and content builder). FrontPage can be used to build weblog pages and through inserting these pages in the correct directory, this content can be automatically published to one's weblog website. Understanding these instructions and making it all happen is no mean feat -- it took me, an experienced user of commercial and shareware software about a day to get everything working properly.

Central to all technate activity is the coordination of multiple texts, multiple tools to build the texts and multiple tools and instances wherein publishing takes place. In addition, change is a major factor in publishing requiring that to use the key feature of electronic language to its fullest, regular change enhances meaning, and adds to the 'living' dimension of electronic texts over printed texts. Daily weblogging is a good example of technate activity. Not only will the published website change, but also the tools change over time requiring the technate user to continually update those tools, update understanding of those tools and constantly exploit the meaning making potential as tools provide new ways of making meaning.

Decoding Weblogs

Composing is one aspect of technate activity. Decoding or 'reading' is another activity -- often done in conjunction with composing in order to use other sites to build one's own site -- although there are times when the technate person 'reads' to take in new information without necessarily composing those readings into one's own site. However, there is an advantage of 'reading' to compose as this provides a trail of where one has been and provides another type of 'reading' -- a recorded reading that another person can follow through and make the same discoveries.

In that technacy involves a wider range of skills than literacy ever did, it is little wonder that technate skills are often used in a mixed manner -- there is little time when one actually just decodes or codes, they are done together and then using words, images, charts, headings, links, key words, in a combination to produce the text or indeed to re-produce the texts electronically.

Texts About Texts

There is a much more profound text composed about weblog texts -- the texts of linkages and readers of those weblogs. There are communities of webloggers out there who are composing and re-composing like I am; and they are connecting to my texts just as I am connecting to theirs. There is a text to which I can refer that traces these links -- for this site on technacy you can find this text here. This text, constantly being updated as people use weblogs, tells me which other weblogs are referring to my site and making my site an integral part of theirs. In addition, I can see how my site ranks by way of the numbers of readers it has in comparison with all other weblogs sites. There are more than 500,000 webloggers and many hundreds of thousands more decoders or readers.

There is more . . . now you can view the BlogTree to see how a weblog is related to other weblogs. BlogTree.com is a web site that maintains a database of weblog relationships and allows you to browse weblogs' pedigree. You can register your weblog(s) and note which weblogs inspired them (their parents). You can then notify the parent weblog's author, as well as authors of any weblogs that you think your weblog inspired, about blogTree.com and encourage them to register their weblogs and note their parent weblogs. As more and more weblog authors participate, unrelated families of weblogs will find common ancestors or descendants.

The conception of many, if not most, weblogs on the web is due to some other, existing weblog. A future weblog author starts reading someone else's weblog and it inspires him or her to begin their own weblog. You can look at the original weblog as the parent weblog of the new weblog. If the new weblog inspires someone else to start another weblog, then the original weblog is the grand parent of the latest weblog, and so on. Of course, some weblogs are inspired by more than one weblog, in which case they would have multiple parents. Weblog Genealogy maps these family relationships between weblogs.

Nature of Technacy

Encompassed within the concept of technacy are a wide range of skills that are ever changing. As texts upon texts are built online and these become more and more interconnected, the range of skills required to decode and code will increase significantly. Add to this the convergence of video, radio, words, links and other forms of texts, then one begins to imagine the complexities available and therefore the potential to make meaning online.

We have not seen anything yet . . . this is the beginning of an exciting trail into building texts that we cannot even imagine as yet.