If you’re reading this, I hope you are having a good day/night or whatever time it is you are reading this. If you are not, well then you wouldn’t know. (I know, the title is grammatically incorrect on purpose.)
So, while reading Mirabelli I found myself getting caught up on the concept of literacy. I mean, he has a point. We usually think of literacy as something related to reading and writing. Sometimes you hear people say, “I’m not computer literate.” When they say this, it is usually as a joke, but it is a real thing. Literacy can be applied to a multitude of things the more you think about it.
Literacy is not just about understanding words, though. It is more so that you are able to communicate with others whom have the same understanding of the concept of which you are literate in. This sounds confusing, I know. But hear me out. Say you are presenting something to your coworker in Excel. Sure, you can read what is on the sheet and maybe you understand a few of the figures, but do you know how to interpret what you have read and how to talk to someone else about it? Can you talk to someone about the functions they used to get certain data to show up? Are you literate in Excel?
Do you get my point? It’s not just being able to say “Oh, yeah. I can read that and get a jist of what you are saying.” You have to be able to carry on a conversation with someone who is literate in that subject, that’s what makes you, literate.
I think a good example of literacy can been seen in the world of meming. So, say someone sees a meme. They get it, they laugh, they share it. That meme is something people know of, and have an understanding of. They adapt it to fit certain situations, but it still retains its core meaning. All of these meme-literate people get it. But then comes along an old marketing firm, pushing out a new product for some company that desperately needs help. They try to be hip and use a meme when marketing their product. It’s that same meme that the people know and love. The thing is, the firm used it in a way that is completely different from the way everyone else has. It is not just different, it is wrong. They “just don’t get it.” They try other memes and fail. They are meme-illiterate.
You can apply this concept of literacy to just about anything. You could say it relates to discourses, but you do not have to be part of a discourse to be literate. I could know about cars for example, and know how to ask about things wrong with my car and parts and what not. But that does not make me a mechanic. I know enough to effectively communicate with another person who is literate in the subject.
It’s funny though, because you think “What makes that person literate?” According to my sentence above, the mechanic is literate, but why? Who does he communicate with that makes him literate? It’s like a chain that goes on forever, until you reach the person who created the subject. Think about reading and writing. Who really was the first literate person? We came up with the concept of reading some time ago, but who was the first to say “I can read!”?
No comments:
Post a Comment