Digital literature and multi-literacies

The way according to which children and young people interact with the literary texts today is deeply influenced by internet and by the digital context in which we are absorbed. The impact of the new technologies of both the communication and information is, on one hand, modifying the nature of literary texts and, on the other hand, producing new forms of stories, included some narrative videogames. We assist at the emergency of a complementarity of languages and tools able to stimulate and to expand the possibilities of the traditional fiction for youths, because the stories are widespread, continued and transformed thanks to various forms of digital interaction. In the twenty-first century the notion of literacy should be reconverted in a plurality of literacies. From the moment in which the emergent technologies continue to influence the social construction of these multi-literacies, to become literate is a more appropriate notion of the being literate, because it postpones to a dynamic and inexhaustible process. The notion of multiliteracy not only alludes to the possibilities offered by the computer but also to the increasing role of the images both in the electronic formats and in the conventional ones, other than to postpone to the necessary distinction among practices of reproductive and critically reflexive alphabetization. Therefore, modern literacy requires the ability to express ideas across a broad range of different systems of representation and signification (including “words, spoken or writ- ten; image, still and moving; musical...3D models...”). Each medium has its own affordances, its own systems of representation, its own strategies for producing and organizing knowledge. Participants in the new media landscape learn to navigate these different and sometimes conflicting modes of representation and to make meaningful choices about the best ways to express their ideas in each context.