Chapter 8: Capitalizing on Digital Literacy: Visual Rhetoric, the Graphic Novel, and Academic Identity

It’s been a commonplace for at least 40 years to say, sometimes with dismay, that students are visually literate. From the early 50s, visually literate children read and understood with ease multiple moving images on a television screen, even if that literacy was more often decried than manipulated by their teachers.¹ Much more sophisticated and complicated than TV, electronic communication’s bewildering, thrilling array of digital possibilities emphasizes the interaction between picture and text, as well as between reader and visual and linguistic text. Unlike the visual literacy requirements to understand television, digital literacy insists on a kind of deeply engaged participation and developing expertise if learners are to negotiate the sidewinding, quick-cut, segmented paths digital communication often takes.