The Appification of Literacy

Succinct Review Of Research: The Future Of Literacy In An App-Centered World

Because of apps and the way they package and define digital media and literacy, new literacy practices are emerging that engender new kinds of literate engagement and new competencies (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, 2013). Children, youth, and adults all benefit from these new media via apps, but usually to the detriment of some time-honored print-centric practices at the heart of our learning and a significant part of the essence human culture. We continue to explore these positive and negative affordances below, by first framing the discussion with cybernetics and the networking of humans.

Peter F. Hamilton (2012) in the book Great North Road constructs a future world that many critics say is a believable view of our possible future relationship to digital technologies and apps in about 130 years. In that future world, the emerging Internet of things has morphed into a world in which we are the things—we all have nodes, or IP address-like connections. These private Electronic Identities (EIs) link us to the net and our body meshes, retinal sensors, and processors are all part of the network. We can share our perceptual data to communicate with others instantaneously. Although we still have identities outside of the net and make the usual sentient decisions to use various technologies, the ecosystem is a collective of experiences and digital data streams that connect everyone.

In Great North Road, the EI is the central app that controls and monitors other apps, but apps are part of our identities, a bioelectronics connection to the world. Granted, any view of life in the future is limited by the restriction of how we envision possibilities grounded in both our current experiences and where we have been in our relationship to technologies. But Hamilton’s world is a viable outcome of the current trajectory of apps and connectivity. We explore this further with a focus on the present.

Aside from the role of apps in organizing and proliferating media consumption overall, apps have replaced or automated countless tasks ranging from reading a children's book to organizing a grocery list, to controlling and monitoring home security systems and appliances, to checking one’s biometrics related to life style. As apps have automated tasks and afforded more “efficiency” in our daily lives they have also replaced many other digital spaces—mostly Web sites where we used to go to read to get static content. Apps are replacing larger pieces of digital real estate that included lots of print on relatively large screens, to less print on small screens and replacing the functionality of those web pages with other modalities more suited to small screens—or, they are replacing linguistic information with icons.

Apple Watch, mentioned previously, is the most extreme example of shrinking digital viewing space. The Internet of things, and, most recently what Elgan (2015) calls the Internet of Self, specifically the Quantified Self, fully eliminate linguistic modes and language in communication. For example, Elgan notes that each day we render lots of biometric data, and apps use biometric sensors to compile data like blood pressure, heart rate, skin surface temperature, respiratory patterns and even sleep patterns. The analyses of these Quantified Self data by software within apps provides information about health and life styles But the compelling point Elgan makes, an assertion that is the remarkably similar to the EI in Great North Road, is that Quantified Self data can be used to command the objects in the Internet of Things directly. In short, apps provide an interface for people to communicate directly with things based on our biometrically indicated states and needs. An app that works with a biometric monitor knows when you are waking and turns on the light next to your bedside. The next step in the Internet of things, with us as things, is networked bio-electronic communication among humans that bypasses traditional written and oral language.