putting the "new" in "new media literacies": a helpful visual aid

Here's a Prezi project I've been working on to visualize some key features of what Kress, Lankshear & Knobel, Scribner & Cole, and others find salient in emerging new media literacy practices.

This visualization emphasizes Lankshear & Knobel's characterization of two distinct approaches to the "new" in "new media literacy." As they explain, the use of 'new' in the paradigmatic sense is a sociocultural approach to literacy practices:

the New Literacy Studies comprise a new paradigm for looking at literacy as opposed to the paradigm that already existed that was based on psychology. The use of 'new' here parallels that which is involved in names for initiatives or movements such as the New School of Social Research, the New Science, the New Criticism (and New Critics) and so on. In all such cases, the proponents think of their project as comprising a new and different paradigm relative to an existing orthodoxy or dominant approach.

Okay, that's the paradigmatic sense of 'new.' Here's the ontological sense, which Lankshear & Knobel explain

refers to the idea that changes have occurred in the character and substance of literacies associated with changes in technology, institutions, media, the economy, and the rapid movement toward global scale in manufacture, finance, communications and so on. These changes have impacted on social practices in all the main areas of everyday life within modern societies.... Established social practices have been transformed, and new forms of social practice have emerged and continue to emerge at a rapid rate.

Gunther Kress, in "Literacy and Multimodality," emphasizes design, perhaps above all else. He explains:

Design does not ask, 'what was done before, how, for whom, with what?' Design asks, 'what is needed now, in this one situation, with this configuration of purposes, aims, audience, and with these resources, and given my interests in this situation?'

Design matters; and my choice to work with Prezi and a publicly accessible blog shaped my engagement with this project. It would have looked very different had I sketched it out on a sheet of paper; even had I sketched it first, with the intention of designing it in Prezi and posting it to my blog.

This visualization is only my first attempt to point to two broad groups of shifts into new media literacy studies. I hope to gather feedback (you can comment below!); return to, revise, and refine this project; and resubmit it for your approval at a later date. Thank you in advance for your input.

To take a look at the visualization, click the arrow below the design. It's interactive--you can zoom in on any part of the graphic.