(okay, my article with comments refuses to load onto here or onto dropbox. Not sure what’s up. Will fix asap)
As a history major, and hopefully a future professor of the subject, I tend to look at most things from an historical point of view, not excluding the concept of literacy.
I assume that this is the reasoning behind my connection with the idea of literacy as power, because in history, that is the sense of literacy that I’ve always garnered. The ability to read and write was kept from lower classes, from women, from minority races and ethnicities in order to maintain class structure, in order to keep power distribution from altering.
This is also why I have trouble connecting the word “literacy” to other subjects and practices other than reading and writing. I feel like the term itself is being stretched too far with these metaphors and is being applied to far too many ideas. This causes its historical meanings and implications to depreciate.
When people are referred to as “computer illiterate” it conveys a very different attitude and meaning. Computer illiteracy isn’t used to hold down a people. It is in no way the same as being illiterate in its original sense. The inability to read and write prevents access to knowledge. Sure, someone could always relay the information found in writing to the illiterate, but that transition provides an extra opportunity to alter information, to introduce bias and personal interest that does not belong to the writer. Priests could alter sermons to suit their own purposes because the laity could not read or interpret the Latin that the Bible was written in. Computer illiteracy only means that the individual must read a book rather than something online.
The application of “literacy” to other subjects devalues the struggle for a general ability to read and to write, which actually provides for the ability to obtain other forms of “literacy”
I don’t at all mean to say that computer, music, and cultural literacy are unimportant, or that the “literacy” metaphor cannot be used for them. The have parts that act as “letters” that are strung together to make “words” and “sentences” and so on. They have small parts that must be learned and processes of complication and putting together that make them a form of literacy.
I just find the terminology problematic and worrying.
As for my experience with literacy, I don’t find it at all special or unique. I began by learning the smallest units: letters, music notes, et cetera. I learned their appearance and then their sound. Then I learned to string them together into words and sentences, verses and choruses. Everything grows and builds upon the very simple.
coffeeshopcavalier 