ABSTRACT
The older social landscape is barely recognizable within our contemporary social landscape. Whether academic or bon vivant, someone was absorbed in questions around reading and writing as social issues and as social practices. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, living in an Iranian village, he conducted a research study in Iran that later became his well-known book. The contemporary “social media” act to amplify the corrosion of conceptions of “society”, brought about through the effects of neo-liberal politics. The traditional media had relatively well-known and well-understood means of identifying “speakers” and “locating” the points of origin of messages–these are entirely missing with the “social media”. Brian V. Street’s work was instrumental in asserting the social grounding of literacy and freeing it from more universalist, rigid framings, and instrumental in allowing us to be in the world with him to see, sense, and understand the profoundly human nature of literacy.
