Literacy in a New Art Form

It’s fascinating to me how Carr and Hodges are so willing to say how illiterate our country is but they never once give a definition of illiteracy.  How can you prove some ’40 million’ people (as stated in Hodge’s essay) are illiterate? With one huge test?  In Scribner’s article he brings up the fact that literacy have been attempted to be defined over and over again and is still inconclusive.  Thus he makes the argument that maybe, “Most efforts at definitional determination are based on a conception of literacy as an attribute of individuals; they aim to describe constituents of literacy in terms of individual ability.” This brings up the real possibility that literacy may be a social achievement rather than an individual one.  This social idea of literacy can be seen in Thompson’s writing as well.  Instead of condoning the countless hours of Facebook posts and tweets, Thompson quotes Professor Andrea Lunsford with saying, “The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.”  Now this is a very unique idea—our little blurbs about our lives and the comments we leave on a friend’s picture may actually be of some type of merit.  We write without even thinking about it because it is a social norm to have a Facebook, twitter, or some type of social networking site in your possession.  Which brings me to what Scribner refers to as Literacy as an adaptation.  It’s obvious in daily life how much we need to be able to read road signs, warnings, not to mention reading that our job requires.  To be a functioning part of society at least in someway, there is no choice but to attempt to be literate.  Maybe not so proficiently to read a novel, but it is important to adapt to your surroundings whatever they may be.  Thompson also had a rather similar argument, he claimed that to fit into the social writing that was happening online there is a “kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” I found this very accurate, especially from an avid user of Facebook.  Since it’s a social writing world we live in now, in order to fit in the writer must be able to adapt to what its readers find appealing and thus adopting ‘kairos.’  I think both Scribner and Thompson do a very complete job in seeing our current way of writing as a new positive.  Now the current illiteracy (although it cant truly be measured) is overwhelmingly high I think it comes down to teaching the basics of reading and writing to every illiterate.  Facebook statuses and Tweets aren’t going to help someone who is truly illiterate, so I think the biggest problem the country has to face in the regards of literacy is going back to the basics most of us learned in our elementary school days.