Is Web 2.0 a New Literacy?

"The more a literacy practice that is mediated by digital encoding privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over ‘normalization’, innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, do-it-yourself creative production over professional service delivery, and so on, the more sense we think it makes to regard it as a new literacy."
--Lankshear, Colin, and Knobel, Michele. (2007). Researching new literacies: Web 2.0 practices and insider perspectives. E-Learning, 4 (3), 224-240. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.2304/elea.2007.4.3.224

Yes! Yeah! Absolutely! Of Course! Duh! Are you kidding me?!? Indeed! Indefinitely!!

If we understand the definition of literacy we can understand how it applies to daily activities. Literacy does not constitute reading and writing ONLY...that is old school.

According to my ultimate resource Merriam Webster.com literacy is the state of being literate. Classic dictionary lingo. Literate as a adjective means "having knowledge or competence". Literate as a noun means "educated person". For the sake of this quote I am going to expound upon the adjectival meaning of literate.

So everything unfamiliar we encounter requires some form of literacy. Web 2.0 are tools that technological advances have made a part of everyday life. These tools have become so popular that it has even changed the way we communicate socially. It truly has changed human interaction and possibly retarded social communication forever. I keep thinking of the Toyota commercial.

http://youtu.be/TUGmcb3mhLM