Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age (Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture) - Hardcover

Tuman, Myron C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822937352 ISBN 13: 9780822937357

Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr, 1992

Synopsis

Here, in simple but dramatic terms, is a story of epic proportion - the struggle between two competing models of literacy: one based in print, and one based in new computer technology and, depending on one's perspective, poised to save or ruin us over the next century. That Mark Twain went on to submit the first typed manuscript to a publisher is today little more than a footnote to the history of literacy and technology. Indeed, typing has had such little impact on literacy education over the past 120 years because it has been perceived as having to do with manipulating and displaying texts rather than with creating and comprehending them. Why then should we expect so much more from computers? This book attempts to answer this question by exploring the enormous impact computers are having on how we read and write, how we teach reading and writing, and, more generally, how we define literacy. It considers the various ways by which technology generally affects not just specific language practices and policies but our most basic understanding of what it means to be literate or to be educated, even to think. Its guiding thesis is that how we as a society generate wealth has a great deal to do with how we relate to each other and to ourselves and, in complex ways that we seldom consider, how we organize education. Word Perfect recounts the transition from one historical epoch to another - from a modern age both rooted in the unprecedented industrial expansion of the last hundred years and committed to the reading and writing of books to a postmodern age rooted in the equally unprecedented expansion in the ability to manage information and likely just as committed to reading and writing with computers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822937352
• ISBN 13: 9780822937357
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 150