their analysis of the implications of this particular conception, but I wouldn’t want to let it shut down other possibilities.

For instance, consider parsing “literacy” this way:

1. In its initial, tight association with the letter, reading and writing, book and print culture, such as Ong’s work elaborates.

2. In an analogic application of #1, carrying the analogy of reading and writing to other symbolic contexts, such as visual literacy, television, and Mark Twain’s learning to “read” the river in Life on the Mississippi.

3. In a very diffuse sense to mean simply “being conversant with the ways of X,” and this includes not only skills but adaptations to the ways of a community and the rhetorical situations of performance.

So I would say we could look at Wynton Marsalis teaching his sons to play jazz and how to function in the jazz community, and figure this as literacy education, but not of any especially virulent sort. The third construction tends to break away and simply point to a healthy process of cultural reproduction among a people. This suggests to me that the issue of oppressive power relations plays across several possible meanings of literacy, and arises specifically in situations involving cultural boundaries, intentional or unintentional (even good-willed) assimilation, identity compromises, and cases like the dysphoria we as skeptics often feel about our own culture.

I’m still thinking about how these ideas might apply to computer and network use.