Through such notions as digital literacy, digital scholarship and academic literacies, the topics of concern are:
- transformations in the way knowledge is organised, stored and transmitted; and
- changes in perceptions of what reliable sources of knowledge are. (Rhodes, 2000: 187)
As well as the accessibility of sources of knowledge (their organisation, storage and transmission), one key issue is how such sources are perceived and evaluated, how they are judged to be reliable, how they are acknowledged to be trustworthy and authoritative, issues which are both technological and social at once.
As Rhodes argues, the relationship between the self and the world is mediated by changing forms of textuality, or what might be called mediacy, i.e. changing media forms and increasingly complex multi-media arrays, and it is through those media forms that our knowledge of both the self and the world is produced.
It is important to note that knowledge concerns both self and world and, indeed, the relationships between self and world, relationships in which media of various forms are active or performative. Media forms affect the character and the direction of the learning experiences whereby knowledge is consolidated and questioned.
These processes are concerned, in part, with what can be relied upon repeatedly and what is recognised as unreliable or unpredictable, and when to feel certain and when to acknowledge feelings of uncertainty. Not all 'knowing' is 'feeling certain', and therefore knowing what will happen and what to do; some 'knowing' concerns when to acknowledge the need for an improvised response in conditions of uncertainty, and thereby to open up a further cycle of learning.
'Knowing' opens onto collective sensemaking, to the individuality-through-sociality of the embodied self, on the one hand, and the regularities and unpredictabilities of the world, on the other hand. Assessment of reliability (trustworthiness and authoritativeness) of any source of knowledge requires repeated evaluation, including the when and the where, the situational value, as well as the who or what, of any knowledge form and content.
Multi-media-textual forms are themselves mediated by intercorporeal interaction, each grounding the other, creating understanding as an emergent form or experience and an achievement in ongoing processes of interaction, both cyclical or enfolding and opening or unfolding.
References
Rhodes, N. (2000). Articulate networks: the self, the book and the world, in The Renaissance computer: knowledge technology in the first age of print, edited by Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, London, Routledge.