How would you define literacy in the 21st century? How would you define modern-day collaboration?
Twenty-first literacy should be divided into public production literacy and private consumption literacy. Production literacy needs to understand how large masses of people use technology because messages need to be made to fit the audience. One example of this understanding revolves around our collective attention span. According to research out of Denmark, a Twitter hashtag stayed in the top 50 an average of 17.5 hours in 2013 and 11.9 hours in 2016 (Lorenz-Spreen et. Al, 2019). As an online community, we get excited about a topic and then lose interest more and more quickly. Any kind of message that requires long-term attention needs to understand that it must be continuously broadcast in different forms to keep it in the public consciousness. If not, the message will quickly be lost to InfoWhelm.
The converse is true for individuals. For an individual to be literate in the 21st century they need to understand at almost an instinctual level how quickly messages explode into our consciousness and then fade away. Simply because we are not seeing a message 24 hours after it first popped up does not mean it has gone away; it has only been replaced by some new message. Along with collective attention, an individual needs to be aware of their attention spans. There are few long-term studies demonstrating shrinking attention spans, but public perception is there. Nearly half of the Britons surveyed feel their attention span is shorter than before and more worryingly, “47 percent say that ‘deep thinking’ has become a thing of the past—roughly double the proportion who disagree with this view (23 percent)” (Kings College London). For topics such as critical thinking and creativity, a person’s perception may be just as important as the truth. If we feel like our attention spans have shortened, we might act as such.
All this results in the counteractive idea that the people with the most 21st-century literacy will be the people who can properly limit their exposure to information. This might be what modern-day collaboration will look like. People will work in groups as specialists, focused on one aspect of a topic, much like a presidential cabinet. Modern groups will need the ability to track messages through time even after the messages have fallen out of the public eye. These groups will need individuals with focus. This focus looks like me right now as I am quickly switching only articles about education and technology while ignoring ESPN and CNN, my email inbox, and the text messages blowing up my phone. This sort of limited multi-tasking might be one example of 21st-century literacy in action.
Kings College London. (Feb. 16, 2022). Are attention spans really collapsing? Data shows UK public is worried, but also see technology benefits. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2022-02-attention-spans-collapsing-uk-technology
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Møsted, B. M., Hövel, P., & Lehmann, S. (2019). Accelerating dynamics of collective attention. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-0 9311-w
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