Literacy

Well, literacy has come into the fore. Literacy is a very interesting word. According to Barton the word itself only showed up in a dictionary as of 1924 and is peculiar to English. it doesn't translate well into French, and is not part of the Japanese, Swedish or Greek vocabularies. It also is a word with baggage and other assorted ideological constructs attached to it that have little to do with writing or reading but alot to do with socialization, as though the literate will not be criminal, or if they are they will go to nice jails with tennis courts and not penitentaries like their illiterate bretheren. Literacy has unfortunately carried with it the notion of civility, which of course would be a suprise to Hannibal Lecter.

Barton also thinks that when we use terms like media literacy, computer literacy etc. we are using literacy as a metaphor for something that isn't literacy but gains credibility through association with such a powerful culturally laden term.

My personal definition of literacy is that it is too important to apply to any given physical technology. It is about thinking abstractly using a shared symbolic system that is capable of being depersonalized and stored separately from the reader/writer. Literacy is about the brain, not the book, TV, computer or fountain pen, but it gives motivation to use these things for storage, retrival and manipulation. There is one literacy; everything else is proficiency. Even the most "computer literate" need to know what to do with the RTFM files. ;)

Literacy: an Introduction to the Ecology of the Written Language
David Barton
Blackwell Press, Oxford 1994