The Selber article, “Reimagining the Functional side of Literacy,” demonstrates a history of a) thinking of “computer literacy” as the purview of rhet/comp, and b) arguing for the teaching of the affordances of specific digital platforms and programs. Although Selber’s definition of “functional literacy” carefully focuses on individuals’ capabilities and needs (assuming a need to function independently within computer discourses users immerse themselves in), as opposed to some objective set of “skills” an outsider or outside group deems “necessary” to qualify as “literate.”
Notes from Feenburg’s “Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview”
Key passages and thoughts on them:
Feenburg’s “instrumentalization theory”:
(47) “To judge an action as more or less efficient is already to have determined it to be tech- nical and therefore an appropriate object of such a judgment.”