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I’ve been thinking a lot about literacy over the past few weeks, specifically about whether it might be time to break down the binary and accept the idea of floating, flexible standards of literacy. This thinking was brought on by Howard Rheingold’s discussion at BBH London HQ, where he posed the question: if the internet has enabled a many-to-many model of communication… where to next?

I have been mulling this over a lot and I believe what’s happening next, or even now, is kind of sea-change, a focus and a shift within that many-to-many communication model.

Smaller, more meaningful, more local communities are emerging through the web. This means that context now plays a greater role in the communication equation. To wit: I now communicate to a meaningful (meaningful to me) few amongst the many, and that makes what I have to say, and what they say back to me, more useful. We don’t have to yell into a great heaving morass of people, anymore. It’s easier to be heard — and to listen to those few who are saying something I want to hear.

What’s more, while there is a practical need for the members of these emerging communities to speak the same language, that language need not be shared outside the group. (Cultural anthropologists have been going on about this forever; why it’s proven such a challenge for the digital brigade to accept, I don’t know. Perhaps we are still looking for the great equalizer?)

What this means, I think, is that the web is a means of connecting people, but not a language in and of itself.*

Herein, I think, lies the new reality of digital literacy: communication amongst the-few-within-the-many need not be measured by the same stick we used to measure all communication by, when it looked like the web was (meaningfully) going in that direction. But it’s not. It’s – beautifully, I think – branching into different communities, many which require different kinds of literacy.

Reading this post again, I’m having one of those ‘how could I be so completely ethnocentric?!’ moments. MY standards of literacy are utterly irrelevant to the members of a community that really has nothing to do with me.

Sure, there’s the ‘in a globalised world we all need the same tools’ argument, but let’s be honest – we’re not going to get them. And doesn’t it make more sense to put the effort into enabling a meaningful, productive information exchanges amongst the few-within-the-many, than it does to enforce one set of standards (rote learning; Western-style literacy) across an entire sea of communities? A little pragmatism, please.

* And so for professionals, this means moving away from ‘doing digital’, and being ‘digitally fluent’, and instead seeing that there is scope to do many things digitally.