Not With Words: The Millennial Generation’s New Literacy

Thesis
Millennial's use of digital technology has moved them far beyond the simple text-based literacy. They use non-print forms of communication, make use of visual and sensory elements, and creatively integrate their technology to form a new, multimodal literacy.

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This multimodal communication, the combination between Gen Y’s digital technology and their non-text expressions, has already begun to enter and affect the world. Since Gen Y is coming into age, entering and leaving college, getting jobs, etc., business and companies have begun to advertise and work with their form of communication. Gen Y members also use their multimodal communication, daily in fact, just by going onto the internet which is ripe with an abundance of sites that communicate with multiple mediums. The website Youtube is the perfect example of this. Many businesses as well as thousands of not millions of millennials have an account there. It is here that one can see the variety of literacies that people use and combine. Multimodal literacy is, as Marcus puts it, “a global phenomenon, and there is no going back” (1934).

It is something which is already being studied quite extensively. For example, the Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium, an international association of hundreds of universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies, Larry Johnson has begun to research and categorize the many different literacies that Gen Y has created or use, calling them the “new media literacy” (72). As stated before, while Gen Y obviously uses digital literacy and visual literacy, they use many other modes of communication as well. These others that have been identified are linguistic, audio, spatial, and gestural literacy (Graham and Benson 95). Linguistics is, of course, nothing new, being simply the dialogue between people. Audio is, naturally, music and sound effects. Spatial literacy is the “reading” and analyzing of the use of space, such as how a desk is decorated. Gestural is another basic communication recognized and identified by Generation Y students as body language.