Innovation
September 14, 2026
We do not just read words
As new codes, technologies, and forms of communication expand what we need to learn to interpret
Being literate is usually understood initially as: recognizing letters, forming words, understanding sentences, and producing texts. For a long time, it was mainly from this domain that we defined what it meant to know how to read and, consequently, to participate in different spaces of society.
But, given contemporary complexity, a growing part of communication no longer happens solely through texts. Images, interfaces, platforms, data, sounds, gestures, and interactions also carry meanings and influence how we interpret what happens around us. Perhaps, then, it is worth returning to the most basic question of all: what does it mean, after all, to know how to read the world?
Writing occupies a central place in the history of human culture. Its importance is such that, in a conventional historical periodization, its invention is often used as a landmark to separate so-called Prehistory from History. More than just recording ideas, writing has allowed information and knowledge to circulate beyond the physical presence of those who produced them. By creating shared codes, such as the alphabet itself, it became possible to communicate something to people distant in space and time.
Vilém Flusser, a Czech-Brazilian philosopher, dedicated a significant part of his work to contemplating communication and the codes we use to make sense of the world. In “The Coded World,” he draws attention to the role of these systems in human experience. A code can be understood as a set of shared signs and rules that allows for the production and interpretation of meanings. Writing is one of these systems, but numbers, images, colors, symbols, and gestures can also constitute forms of communication. It is through these codes that we record ideas, share information, and interpret what happens around us.
Alphabets
Among the different forms of writing, alphabets gained enormous historical importance by representing the sounds of language through visual signs organized in sequence. This made it possible to record, preserve, and transmit information in a lasting and large-scale manner. For Flusser, however, the influence of the alphabet goes beyond recording: the linear structure of writing, traversed from beginning to end, also participates in the way we organize arguments, establish cause-and-effect relationships, and construct narratives about the world.
Understanding letters and mastering writing, what we associate with traditional literacy, was and continues to be fundamental. But life in society has never depended solely on alphabetic or alphanumeric codes. As new technologies, languages, and forms of communication emerge, so does what we need to interpret to participate in the world around us.
In the digital environment, different media formats, platforms, and algorithms have come to mediate how we inform ourselves, communicate, and make decisions, often without our fully understanding the mechanisms behind what we see.
As I have already discussed in other columns, digital literacy has become an increasingly important condition for the exercise of citizenship. Even seemingly trivial forms of communication, such as memes, have come to carry their own repertoires, references, and meanings.
Different literacies add up and expand our capacity to interpret the world. Understanding a code, however, goes beyond knowing how to operate a tool that uses it. We can read a text without understanding the graph that accompanies it, navigate a platform without realizing how our choices influence our behavior, or use an AI model without being able to evaluate how an answer was produced.
A large part of these technologies, in fact, is designed to appear simple. Companies invest in design precisely to reduce the complexity of the user experience and make interfaces more intuitive. The simpler it is to operate a system, the less evident everything we need to understand to use it critically can become.
However, it is fundamental to understand the difference between literacy and literacy practices. In Brazil, this discussion gained strength from the 1980s onwards, with Magda Soares as one of its main references.
Literacy is linked to the appropriation of the writing system; being literate involves knowing how to participate in social practices constructed through reading and writing. They are different but interdependent processes: we learn the code at the same time we learn to use it in the contexts where it gains meaning. Mastering this system is fundamental, but not sufficient. It is also necessary to know how to interpret it and act through it.
Over time, the concept of literacy has been expanded to other systems, practices, and forms of communication. Each era demands new literacies because each historical context produces codes that also need to be understood and interpreted.
In 1996, researchers gathered at the New London Group presented the concept of multiliteracies to respond to changes that were already transforming communication. On one hand, the cultural and linguistic diversity of societies was growing; on the other, the media and the ways in which people produced and interpreted meanings were multiplying.
The concept, therefore, is not limited to a list of new skills. It recognizes that reading and communication happen through different languages and within different cultural contexts. After all, we do not just read words.
Understanding a message, therefore, requires more than identifying each element in isolation. Meaning is also built in the relationship between them, in the context in which they appear, and in the interpreter’s repertoire. Physical or virtual spaces, different media, or gestures can communicate without relying on words. And the reader does not receive this meaning passively: they associate references, interpret signs, and reconstruct the message based on their own experience.
This expansion begins with the ability to decode a system, but does not end there. Recognizing the signs is only the first step. We also need to interpret their meanings, understand the contexts in which they are used, critically evaluate what they produce, and from this, create, participate, and transform.
This expansion also appears in the way Unesco treats literacy today. Reading and writing continue to be fundamental skills, but they are no longer sufficient for an increasingly digital and information-intensive society.
Therefore, the organization also highlights literacies such as digital, media and informational, data, and artificial intelligence. Despite the differences between them, they all go beyond technical use: they involve accessing and interpreting information, understanding how it was produced, evaluating its reliability, recognizing biases and interests, and acting critically and responsibly.
These literacies also do not function in isolation. We can think of them as lenses that, when overlapped, help broaden our worldview. Each offers different tools for interpreting what surrounds us and, together, they allow for a more complete reading of the systems we participate in. As new technologies mediate our relationship with information, knowledge, and decision-making, what we need to interpret, evaluate, and understand also expands.
But expanding does not mean replacing. Nor does it make sense to organize literacies in a simple hierarchy, as if some were always more important than others. There are literacies that become especially relevant in the face of the transformations of each era, while others provide a basis for new skills to be developed. They accumulate as part of a learning curve: what we already know how to read, interpret, and question helps build a repertoire for understanding more recent systems. New codes, therefore, do not erase the previous ones; they add new layers to what we have already learned to use to understand the world.
The contemporary challenge may also lie in the speed with which these layers accumulate. We interpret different languages and systems simultaneously, and the more they coexist, the greater the repertoire (and effort) required to move between them. This adaptation, however, does not happen the same way for everyone. Alan Kay, a computer scientist, summarizes this difference well: “technology is anything that wasn’t invented before you were born.”
What for one generation emerges as novelty and demands adaptation may, for another, be part of the environment from the outset. This does not mean that younger people are born literate in these systems. Growing up surrounded by certain technologies can make their use more familiar and reduce the strangeness of new codes. But familiarity is not the same as understanding. Living with these systems from an early age does not eliminate the need to learn to interpret, question, and use them critically.
Thinking about these new literacies also reveals a privilege: that of already having access to foundations that a large part of the population does not yet possess. Expanding literacy and ensuring mastery of reading and writing remain fundamental tasks. At the same time, these capabilities, on their own, are no longer enough to understand all the systems that are part of our experience. Each social transformation adds new languages, technologies, and ways of producing meaning, and with them, something new that we also need to learn to read.
If codes, technologies, and practices continue to change, there is also no definitive set of skills capable of ending this learning. More than accumulating a growing list of literacies, the challenge is to maintain the ability to expand our repertoire in the face of new systems of meaning.
Learning to read, in this sense, ceases to be just a stage of education and becomes a continuous practice of understanding what, in each new context, also needs to be read. An essential competence for encoding, decoding, and interpreting the transforming world.
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Who wrote this column
Lucas Tangi
