Gaming

I am once again motivated to read Gee's book about videogames and literacy. I don't know, but I'm guessing that's the first piece that started people thinking about this. This also made me think about an article from Psycholinguistics (DeBeaugrande & Dressler) that discusses what is a text. As we've also discussed in here, we must shift away from our traditional ideas that a text is a set of words written or printed on paper or a screen.

The idea that text is so much more also reminds me of Discourses. I wonder if you could say that Discourses are texts that only certain people know how to read and even fewer are allowed to write.

I was also led to think about another interest of mine, which I also have very little background in--semiotics. As we discussed World of Warcraft and how even different symbols were text, it reminded me of how (like I said above) text is more than words. Anything that carries meaning is text, even pieces of oral language. I wonder how far we will go towards signs becoming more important than text. I still don't see that happening the way some (Kress) argue. The thought brings up other important ideas, such as subjectivity. Signs clearly denote something, but where they really pack in a punch are with what they connote, and that is all subjective. With more signs and fewer words, I wonder how our understandings of the same sign will differ, perhaps without us even knowing or discussing it. Not earth shattering, but still a shift, and I think an interesting one.