So one of my students turned in a quiz last night on which she'd used not just a handwritten emoticon (ie. one of those little smileys done with punctuation 🙂 for example) but also the acronym "LOL." I was struck by how unlikely it was she'd learned these things in school, and yet she'd managed to acquire them via this universal internet culture that permeates everything these days.
There was a time when I was younger when the phenomenal growth of television was causing people to predict a demise of literacy, and the term post-literacy was tossed about. I'm beginning to wonder if the news of the death of literacy was a bit premature – the internet, and telephone text-messaging, and such, seem to be giving good ol' literacy a bit of a boost, but with some odd twists, too.
The odd literacy of the online world is qualitatively different from the literacy of books and even newpapers. It more closely resembles the strange permutations of advertising language than what we traditionally think of as literature. Of course, writers like James Joyce or Vicente Huidobro anticipated so many of its features, but I still feel inclined to think it needs a new name – something that conveys it is new and distinct from old school literacy. Not to mention I love to make up words.
So I shall call it textacy (in parallel with liter-acy I guess).