Wow– I was at first thrown by Howard’s pur­ple flow­ery suit, only to be amazed at his insight into how the Dig­i­tal Divide is about peo­ple who know how to con­sume infor­ma­tion and those who don’t. The “crit­i­cal con­sump­tion” and “atten­tion” lit­era­cies I find most fas­ci­nat­ing, since it requires you to selec­tively pay atten­tion to infor­ma­tion stream­ing by, yet not get caught up in ADD such that you lose track of your goals and what is misinformation.

JD– keep post­ing great stuff like this!

Per­haps there are even more pow­er­ful, sub­tle issues. In order to become a com­pe­tent infor­ma­tion con­sumer, first you have to think of your­self in those terms. There are many peo­ple whose per­sonal iden­tity or sense of self are not con­sis­tent with such a role: “I’m too old for that”, “I’m just a girl”, “I don’t speak Eng­lish and everything’s in Eng­lish”. It doesn’t mat­ter if any of these are true, it’s that the per­son in ques­tion thinks they’re true. Remem­ber, not every­one is the ratio­nal, empow­ered early adopter you are, Dear Reader. Things that one hasn’t done can only be under­stood as part of a mys­te­ri­ous nar­ra­tive; one’s own self rarely stars in those, and may be entirely absent.

Great video. The notion of what is it to be ‘lit­er­ate’ in the devel­op­ing cloud poses some inter­est­ing ques­tions. The poten­tial advan­tages could pay off sig­nif­i­cantly. This video from TED’s worth a watch that extends this idea far into the unknown around the sub­ject of genomics: http://bit.ly/nsrxY. The idea of ‘crap detec­tion’ online will also advance and much like food for­ag­ing, those who innately sense crap (through page pre­sen­ta­tion, writ­ing, pop­u­lar­ity, user bio info, per­haps even URL’s) will refine their effi­ciency to infor­ma­tion for­ag­ing to and become very good at it. Poses some inter­est­ing ques­tions in rela­tion to edu­ca­tion — beyond a cer­tain age, do you teach kids spe­cific sub­jects, or give them the tools to opti­mally teach them­selves? Much like the ‘catch the fish / teach to fish’ analogy.

Thank you Mr. Rein­gold — I have some new mate­r­ial for my class — “Tech­nol­ogy in the Class­room.” I am offi­cially adding you to my list of ped­a­gogy heros:)

[…] May­field (VP, Head of Global Media, iCross­ing). Spoke about Howard Rhein­gold and his media literacies […]

[…] and pro­fes­sor Howard Rhein­gold, who did this won­der­ful short video with me on 21st cen­tury media lit­era­cies at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity in July, cited two […]

[…] and pro­fes­sor Howard Rhein­gold, who did this won­der­ful short video with me on 21st cen­tury media lit­era­cies at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity in July, cited two additional […]

[…] Orig­i­nally recorded and writ­ten by JD Lasica for Socialmedia.biz and first pub­lished on July 18th, 2009 as “Howard Rhein­gold On Essen­tial Media Literacies“. […]