New Literacies
According to Gee, there are at least two reasons why we should consider literacy in broader terms than the traditional conception of literacy as the ability to read and write. First, in our world today, language is by no means the only communication system available. Many types of visual images and symbols have specific significances, and so “visual literacies” and literacies of other modes, or the concept of multimodal literacy, are also included in Gee’s conception of new literacies. Second, Gee proposes that reading and writing (the ‘meat’ of literacy according to the traditional notion of the term) are not such obvious ideas as they first appear. “After all,” he states, “we never just read or write; rather, we always read or write something in some way”. In other words, according to which type of text we read there are different ways in which we read depending on the “rules” of how to read such a text. Literacy to Gee, even if it is the traditional print-based literacy, should be conceived as being multiple, or comprising different literacies, since we need different types of literacies to read different kinds of texts in ways that meet our particular purposes or reading them.
Furthermore, Gee also argues that reading and writing should be viewed as more than just “mental achievements” happening inside people’s minds; they should also be seen as “social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and political implications”. So, in Gee’s view, literacies are not only multiple, but inherently connected to social practices. In order to expand the traditional view of literacy as print literacy, Gee recommends that we think first of literacy in terms of semiotic domains. By this, he means “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings”. There is a seemingly endless and varied range of semiotic domains, including (but certainly not limited to) cellular biology, first-person-shooter video games, rap music, or modernist painting. Most pundits would describe this conception of literacies as a key element in what has come to be known as the New Literacy Studies. In short, this theoretical and methodological orientation emphases studying language-in-use and literacies within their contexts of social practice. It includes work by colleagues such as Brian Street, Gunther Kress, David Barton, Mary Hamilton, Courtney Cazden, Ron Scollon, and Suzie Scollon, among others.
Gee's current work in the field of new literacies has seen him shift in his research focus somewhat from studying language-in-use to examining the D/iscourses of a range of new social practices—with a particular emphasis on video games and learning. Gee applies many key concepts from his previous research to studying video games. For example, Gee continues to argue that if we take reading to mean gaining understanding (instead of simply decoding letter sounds and words), one needs to be able to recognize or produce meanings inherent to any one semiotic domain in order to be literate in that domain. As such, and as Gee sets out in his text What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, one can be literate in the semiotic domain of video games if he or she “can recognize (the equivalent of “reading”) and/or produce (the equivalent of “writing”) meanings” in the video game domain. Therefore, because new literacies are multiple and attached to social and cultural practices, Gee explains that people need to (1) be literate in many different semiotic domains, and (2) be able to become literate in other *new* semiotic domains throughout their lives. This theoretical orientation aligns with work in the broad field of "new literacies" research—by colleagues such as Colin Lankshear, Michele Knobel, Henry Jenkins, Kevin Leander, Rebecca Black, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler, among others.
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