Reading people, writing machines: New literacies for an era of mass surveillance

This paper explores the kinds of literacy skills students need to develop for a world in which nearly every word they read and write will being recorded, logged, aggregated, and analyzed. It discusses how to critically engage students in understanding the ways the nature of reading and writing has changed in this era of mass surveillance and ‘big data’, and how they can creatively confront these changes. Topics that will be discussed include: Algorithmic culture (how texts read their readers) Writing the self online (social media and identity) Curating content (who owns digital texts?) The talk will present practical classroom activities to help students reflect on the new creative opportunities and the new dangers posed by online writing.