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Lifestyle Diglossia and Mobile: Ethnography of Multilingual Interaction
Abstract
This chapter proposes to chart the development of understanding of literacy as a practice, which is now digital in nature and globally distributed, therefore digital literacy practices require new lenses and ways of research explorations. The notion of literacy has shifted from being autonomous to ideological during the last three decades. It is not seen anymore as a single unified competence, but as changing from place to place and varying in different social-cultural contexts. Despite the fact that there are different writing systems that are used in different ways in different contexts, the differences between them are no longer seen as primarily technical (Graff, 1979; Heath, 1983; Street, 1993). The differences that do exist between literacies are seen as being due to differences in cultural practices, values and ideologies. As a consequence, the methodological shift towards ethnographic research on literacy has arisen from a fundamental change in thinking about the nature of literacy and the development of the “new literacy studies” (Street, 1993: 4). Ethnographic approaches to literacy, such as those developed by Heath (1983), Street (1984), Barton (1991, 1994) and others are based on the everyday uses of written language(s) by specific groups and subgroups in a specific locality. According to Graff, these approaches to literacy provide “both new and better cases for study, opportunity for explanations, and approaches to literacy's variable historical meaning and contribution” (1986: 127). The ethnographic research on literacies in multilingual contexts (e.g. Saxena, 1994; Hartley, 1994) further contributed to the development of ‘new literacy studies' (NLS). However, with the development of mobile devices during the last decade and the allied software industries, digital literacy communication has become synonymous with globalisation and a divergence between the literacy practices in ‘regulated spaces' and ‘unregulated spaces' (Sebba, 2009) particularly among the youth is becoming a marked feature of inter-personal communication. Sebba defines ‘unregulated spaces' as places where the prescriptiveness of standardisation and monolingualism has not yet reached, or where it holds no power and practices may deviate from the prescribed norms. Such spaces open up opportunities for identity construction and group definition.
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