Book Review: Coding Literacy by Annette Vee ★★⯪☆☆

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark. The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what we mean by "literacy" and, by contrast, what it meant to be "illiterate". As per the standard for academic monographs, it is more interested in endlessly discussing the semantics of a term than engaging with its impacts. The historic stuff is genuinely fascinating. But the endless diversions about what Academic A thinks and how Academic B rebuts is a little tedious. There are clear parallels between a pre-literate society relying on the village scribe and the modern family having that one cousin who "knows computers" - but it is only weakly explored. There are moments when it seems like the author is really going to delve in to what coding literacy actually means: The relationship between…