Literacy is changing. At BYU, we're retooling first year writing courses and implementing "multimodal literacy." It boils down to learning how to communicate using media in combination with words, mostly. Literacy is starting to be about design, about the combination of elements, not just text, nor just text + illustrating picture. There is a dynamic at play between the two, and there are different ways one engages audiences through adding image, video, audio, or hyperlinking to one's communication. 

I notice now that I think very differently about reading. I've been reading Daniel Boorstin's book, The Discoverers, a very good layman's history of famous voyages, inventions, and cultural changes. As I turned the pages, I found myself impatient with the fact that there was no image of the Ptolemaic world maps that he was discussing at length. I quickly pulled up very good images of the various maps he was talking about on my iPhone. Sure, I followed his words, but suddenly his words meant a lot more when I could see the thing he was talking about. How could anyone publish a book today and keep such readily available media from those who could profit from it? More...

Our concepts of literature and writing are directly connected to the formats that have become natural to us. It used to be that books (with few or no pictures) were a baseline kind of literacy. That is less the case now. Not only are books filled with pictures, but they tend to exist in a thickly mediated environment, much of which is electronic or at least highly influenced by things digital. Even my son's math book interrupts itself and sends him to go check out an online tutorial before resuming his paper-and-pencil problem set. Now that electronic means of both producing and consuming writing are competing with traditional paper modes, how will this affect Mormon literary habits? More...

Is your embodied experience endangered by books?

Embodiment is among the most important doctrines emphasized within the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The mortal experience central to the plan of salvation is a physical experience; matter matters -- to our spirits, and to our spiritual lives. I believe and embrace this doctrine. It was driven home recently by Elder David Bednar in a Church Educational System fireside, who connected our physical selves with human relationships and divine principles: "[O]ur relationships with other people, our capacity to recognize and act in accordance with truth, and our ability to obey the principles and ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ are amplified through our physical bodies." Elder Bednar expressed cautions regarding virtual experience online and the digital diversions that can damage or challenge more authentic relationships. More...

I was glad to read Margaret Young's post encouraging international Mormon art and literature. I'm all for it -- the needed diversity, the enriching that happens as subcultures and individuals of deeply varied experience find ways of expressing their lives and their religious faith. Like so many, I look forward to an improving and expanding scope for Mormon arts and letters. But I also want to critique certain assumptions about cultural progress that I think are at work among us Mormons looking for those Miltons and Shakespeares (or Gabriel Gracia Marquezes or Stephen Spielbergs) of our own.

There is the growth of the kingdom of God and then there is the growth of Mormon culture. I'm personally very committed to one and very wary of the other. I worry that we may be looking at these as going hand in hand, following a very 19th century, unilineal approach to cultural progress that may have little relationship to God's influence spreading in the world. More...