I've begun seeing different literacies in my life, as my posts have shown. Now there's another. I watch (too much) television with the sound off most of the time (in part because our televisions don't receive sound at the same rate, so there's an echo). I find that I almost enjoy 'reading' the text more than hearing the words. Sometimes I put the sound on and still have the closed captioning. It's interesting when part of the 'text' is left out of the captioning. Depending on the program, there are often way too many [bleep]s (that's how it displays) and so much conversation that doesn't make it into the captioning. One of my issues is names. So someone is named Vito; he's not Italian, and I'm okay with that. Then it turns out that his mother spelled it Veto. What?
In my community I speak a different 'language' than most of our friends, in part from school and in part from things I hear (my husband's friend says I have a musical ear) and read (and learn). I spent five minutes explaining to three women what baby mama drama is. Am I street literate? No way. But am I reading a different world? I think so. I read my world. My world is larger for my reading. I think all of us are fortunate that we have the desire and ability to read more of our worlds. So many worlds, so little time.
Joyce - I never thought about the challenges of translating from oral to closed caption speech! This would be a really cool study in meta-linguistics: what goes on in oral speech versus written? How much of one modality is untranslatable to another? What are the sociocultural uses of each? etc...You're on to something...again....:)B.
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