Challenging Literacy - Exploring Mediacy

Exploring Mediacy- Challenging Literacy Print culture is contested in digital culture. Analytical concepts in literary theory and also media studies are foremost derived from studies of manuscripts and print texts. In an attempt to understand the intersections between print text and image concepts as ”new visual culture” have been elaborated. This has been necessary as production and reception of texts, in a wide sense, is fundamentally multimodal. Therefore the new concepts have been placed under the head-line ”multiliteracy”, not the least in order to describe, analyse and understand what literacy is in digital culture The theoretical development must be brought further. The problem we are facing is that the word literacy is too bound to ”littera”, the latin word for letter and in close relationship to print cukture; ”littera” is also used in different areas in order to classify objects. ”Mediacy” would be a better word to signify what should be signified, but seems in some cases be equivalent with ”digital literacy”. This is too narrow a definition of ”mediacy”. The purpose of my paper will be to elaborate theoretically on the possibility of challenging ”literacy” exploring ”mediacy”. Medicay would of course include the skills etc connected to the production and reception of print text. In the discussion concepts as new media, writing machines, hypertextuality, cybertextuality, technotextuality, text as process, remediation, and media-specific analysis will be actualized