history.child.book.shop.2.0.

In the context of the 2011 London riots and the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests, I question what it means to be literate by contrasting communication strategies (used effectively by social networking young people to provoke social change), against banal official forms of literacy (defined by large scale state-mandated curriculum and assessment exercises) as used to close it down. By focusing on ways in which twenty-first century constructions of 'history' 'child' 'book' and 'shop' are pre-figured by the late-Enlightenment constructions of those terms, I explain that an eighteenth revolutionary ethos (formed largely in the aftermaths of the French and American revolutions) can be used as a precedent for an emerging twenty-first century ethos – which although revolutionary, is as yet undefined. To demonstrate how late-Enlightenment constructions of my four key terms, history, child, book and shop, prefigure their twenty-first century '2.0' counterparts, I locate my discussion in the children's book businesses of each period. Taking my cue from Marshall McLuhan's prescient aphorism, 'we march backwards into the future', I show how education is used, as he says, 'as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon retribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age'.