Knowledge: Navigating the Visual Ecology—Information Literacy and the ‘Knowledgescape’ in Young Adult Fiction

Abstract

The poet John Milton, according to popular belief, might have been the last man to grasp the sum-total of recorded knowledge by reading—around 400 years ago—every book contemporaneously in print (Pepperell 2009, p. 384). Today, a single issue of The New York Times contains more information than an average man in the seventeenth century would have had access to in his lifetime (Epstein 2007, p. 20). In this milieu of ever-expanding knowledge—dubbed by many the Information Age—information literacy, or in broad terms, the ability to identify, analyse and use information effectively and responsibly, has been heralded by educators as an essential skill for the modern child as well as the life-long learner. How, then, and to what extent has this overwhelming concern with information literacy made its mark on literature for children and young adults? Using Julie Bertagna’s Exodus (2003) and Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011) as case studies, I consider how contemporary fiction is responding to the exponential increase in information that characterises the Information Age, arguing that the textual trope of a ‘knowledgescape’—or digital landscape—renders the quest to navigate today’s information-saturated environments a metaphor for becoming information literate.