Digital Literacy: an analysis of social practices in cyberspace from the accessibility and frequency of use

This paper discusses the Digital Literacy and the importance of social practices of reading and writing nowadays. The research aims to analyze the accessibility of Digital Literacy of the residents from the satellite cities in Distrito Federal and the frequency of use of cyberspace to conduct reading and writing activities. According to Levy (1999), the transmutation of various means of communication (telephone, printed newspapers and post office, for example, in chat, digital newspapers and email, respectively) enabled the synchronous communication, interactivity and sharing of information between people from different places in the world, whether in oral form - as in video conferencing and telepresencial classroom - either in writing - as in most digital genres. It is this latter method - the writing, and hence the reading on the Internet - which has guided our discussion. According to Soares (2002), we live in a era of changes in the practices of reading and writing due to new forms of interaction between reader, author and text provided by the communication in the global computer network. Nothing better, therefore, than investigating how the user handles literacy in this new environment. The Digital Literacy, according to Xavier (2005), requires new ways of reading and writing. This means that time-honored practices of literacy, for example, should be rethought and reformulated in order to insert new ways of understanding the learning process - from handling the text to your perception, through the reading of written texts, engravings and icons linked to the electronic sphere. In this sense, the Digital Literacy, associated with multimodal genres, is present in the daily lives of several people from different social classes - particularly in large urban centers. So, facing this situation, we investigate if the residents of the satellite cities of DF have easy access to digital literacy and how often they make use of texts in cyberspace.

PATHWAY IN MEMORY: RELATIONS BETWEEN THE VERBAL AND VISUAL IN INFOGRAPHIC

The relationship between verbal and visual materiality in printed infographics is provided. The manner the verbal significant updates certain discursive memories may be understood when related to the visual significant is thus investigated. Whereas the object under investigation is an infographic of the magazine Saúde titled The virus that combats viruses; the analysis, which is based on a materialist theoretical stance, triggers the notions of memory and materiality. Content effect reiterates the functioning of the linguistic sign through the language’s literality within the word-thing relationship and it establishes itself within the visual stance while producing faithful effects with the real. When one investigates the manner discursive memory performs the relationship between the verbal and the visual in infographics, one understands that this relationship is established within the context of incompleteness of the above-mentioned types of materiality. It also occurs within the equivocation that verbal materiality may be complemented by the visual or that the image may faithfully represent the real. The formulation of infographics demands-updates-reaffirms a verbal faithfulness with the visual within a content relationship. Verbal interweaving (in explicatory graphics) with images (the visual) produces meaning effects that project language as an instrument, ideal in its transparency, and literally reveals the thing to which it refers.