Through green eyes: complex visual culture and post‐literacy

Abstract

By way of reclamation of the metaphor ‘green,’ this paper contends that research regarding the relationships between children’s literatures and cultures and environmental experience requires a reinvigorated consideration of the role of the visual. The heightened importance of visual texts is made evident via three primary, contemporary conditions of textual dissemination: hyper‐circulation, shifts from page to screen as the dominant method of textual transmission, and increases in visuals as the primary mode of information conveyance. The conditions of textual distribution also call to question the status quo understanding of children’s subject formation. This paper contends that by examining new media technologies in conjunction with methodologies borrowed from studies of complex ecology and systems theories, research might be able to better theorize how and why children’s texts influence children’s lived experiences with environments and place. Ultimately, this paper proposes not just that a greater attention to the visual rhetoric of children’s texts is crucial, but that researchers also consider how current contexts encourage child subjects to produce texts as active agents within complex networks, not only interpret them.

Keywords:

• children’s culture
• literacy
• visual rhetoric
• circulation
• production

Notes

1. What Greenfield does not claim in her report to the House of Lords is that such changes are inherently negative, but instead that there is a need to better understand the role of screen culture and information technologies and the ways in which humans are adapting to such changes in environmental conditions. The news media following her report, however, accentuated such changes as specifically negative, altering the perception of Greenfield’s carefully chosen words to warnings. Greenfield’s premises are intriguing, and certainly demand the kinds of research for which she calls.

2. Out of an interest for further explanation into Greenfield’s ideas (which, interestingly, she often reports as ‘suggestions’ rather than more concrete forms of claims), I do want to note that when addressing the role of information technologies and social spaces – that is MySpace, Facebook, YouTube – Greenfield’s notions of social interaction and technology seems to create a binary between a form of ‘reality’ and a technological simulacra. I find this kind of separation to be suspect in its authentication of pre‐digital technologies as ‘reality’ and would – in another venue – like to explore the idea that technological spaces are ‘less real’ than other forms of spaces; I do not believe they are. Greenfield’s claims have been criticized (correctly, I believe) as technophobic.

3. I use the term visual texts to suggest texts that rely primarily on visual representations other than writing. Writing, of course, is itself a visual text, but I mean here to distinguish between writing and other forms of texts. These terms are, of course, problematic, particularly for those of us interested in image as mechanisms of information conveyance given that the making of a visual is akin to the act of writing, if not identical. Likewise, the term visual text is used generically to include many forms of visual representations, including but not limited to images, graphics, animations, video, and so on. Visual, then, is intended as an umbrella term. I note these terminological differences because within the study of visual rhetorics the distinction between kinds of visuals is significant in how meaning is conveyed.