What is the new media ecology accelerating the Skills 2020?
The new media ecology should be treated using a wide range terminology that concerns a whole ecosystem. This ecosystem is set around and is defined by new media. The limits of each ecosystem are set by the definition of literacy and illiteracy within the ecosystem.
Up until now, people seeking a position in an ecosystem, like for instance a young person starting out in their career, had to possess the minimum required skills for literacy. In the past, people were considered illiterate if they could not read or if they did not have the necessary formal skills, such as typing. Today, not only are those skills considered minimum, they are taken for granted.
The media have evolved far beyond their traditional realm, and illiteracy no longer solely concerns text. Information is now communicated through media that make use of animation and video, and information on the internet is digitised and found in the form of text, audio and various combinations of all media types. Even the very materials of the devices we are using, our computers, our tablets and our phones, are a combination of data and information. Nowadays, thanks to various types of software, we can communicate simultaneously through Facebook, Skype or even using different codes of communication, such as emoticons, sms, several linguistic codes or combinations of symbols. Teenagers are of course masters of all the above. All these new types of communication are introduced in courses that are part of the official curriculum in universities in the USA. Those are core courses, which if students fail, have to be re-taken at a later date.
Therefore, exposure to this vast collection of new media and communication codes is essential for any job candidate entering the job market nowadays. When teams around the world constantly communicate with each other through new media and technology, lacking these skills is definitely considered an inadequacy.
