ABSTRACT
One of the central themes of the so-called New Literacy Studies (see Barton, 1994; Gee, 1996, 2000; and Street, 1995, for programmatic statements) is this: If you want to ask questions about literacy, don’t look at reading and writing in themselves, but as they are embedded within specific social practices. In a narrow sense, reading and writing are technologies, and like all technologies they have no effects in and of themselves, but only specific (and different) effects as they mediate different activities within different social practices.
