Misspent Youth: Literacy Through Geekdom

Sections

• The Magic of Reading
• Creating My Own Stories
• One Literacy to Rule Them All?

The Magic of Reading

The Wind in the Willows

I blame my parents. They insisted on reading in my presence every day. Of course, they read me children’s books, Dr. Seuss, the Wind in the Willows and the adventures of Curious George.

Yet even when they were not reading to me, they still read newspapers, magazines and big fat books full of mysterious words. My mother loved thrillers, books that usually had a rose, a gun, or a hammer and a sickle on the cover. My father’s books often had aliens, spaceships or mysterious gray-clad men in pointy hats and dragons on the cover. They didn’t share these books with me, so I knew they were keeping important magical secrets from me. If my parents could read those books for hours — which to a three-year-old child is a significant fraction of forever — then obviously there was something there I needed to discover.

Creating stories online: Two perspectives

Sections

• Marble Hornets
• The Guild
• References

The traditional means of producing media are starting to falter.  The ratings for over-the-air television broadcasts are dropping, and sales of print books are falling.  Creators of stories are faced with a greater challenge in finding venues to share their works.  While there are more people writing and submitting content than ever, publishers and studios are struggling to get enough revenue to continue buying and distributing content. In this fiercely competitive environment, creators are forced to look to new media to bring their stories to their audiences.

The internet has been a means to share content for years.  There are many original works that would have never found a traditional outlet, from webcomics, podcasts, homemade animations, to creative blogs in which every entry is a new chapter or short story.  This model has allowed creators to find audiences without the intervention of major publishing and distribution sources.

The Many Versions of a Downtrodden Magical Detective

Sections

• Overview
• Original Text
• Audiobook
• Television Series
  • Storm Front Episode
• Graphic Novel
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Where once it used to be unusual for a text to be adapted into several different forms, today there are several works appearing in varied formats. The internet provides another place for an audience to discuss and adapt works on their own. Message boards provide a forum for discussion years after initial critical response to a work is completed, emails make it easy to send thoughts to an author, and websites provide venues for the sharing of fan-created fiction and art inspired by a text.

The Dresden Files book series by Jim Butcher has been adapted multiple times. The series follows the story of Harry Dresden, the only wizard listed in the phone book, who works as a private detective and a sometimes-reluctant hero who stands between the monsters and normal people. The series currently has twelve books and a number of short stories, audiobooks, comic books (also known as graphic novels), a television series, and a role-playing game. The most adapted volume of the series is the first book, Storm Front.