Problematising traditional ‘print’ literacy
As UNESCO found over 50 years ago, it’s almost impossible to consider ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ persons as being part of two separate groups:
“Literacy is a characteristic acquired by individuals in varying degrees from just above none to an indeterminate upper level. Some individuals are more or less literate than others but it is really not possible to speak of illiterate and literate persons as two distinct categories.” (UNESCO, 1957)
Instead, literacy should be considered on a spectrum — as individuals being ‘more literate’ or ‘less literate’ than others. I am, for example, more literate than my seven year-old son. He is more literate than my three year-old daughter, and so on. Although age does not have a one-to-one relationship with literacy it, too, is a useful conceptual shorthand for ascertaining how literate someone is likely to be. A person’s chronological age is usually strongly correlated with years of schooling. And school, hopefully, is where we learn to become literate.
Next comes the issue of the purpose of reading and writing. If you asked me to compose an essay, right now, on a subject of my choice, I’d be able to do so quickly and relatively easily. Society, therefore, considers me to be literate. Part of this is due to the number of years I spent as a learner in formal education, but it’s mostly to do with what society counts as ‘being literate’. If using markup, scripting and programming languages was what counted, then I’d perhaps be considered less literate. If communicating using networked texts and social media, then perhaps a little more so. We’ll consider this social aspect of literacy in more depth in the final section of the chapter.
Several related ideas are elided (and hidden) by our commonsense definition of literacy as ‘being able to read and write’. Literacy involves:
- Reading for understanding
- Writing to be understood by others
- Using a tool to write
Traditionally, literacy has been a great leveller. The spread of books after the invention of the printing press, and the ability to read them, is credited with a decline in support for the Catholic church and a rise in non-conformism. Before books went digital, they were created either by using a pen or by using a printing press. These tools are technologies. Literacy, therefore, is inextricably linked with technology even before we get to ‘digital’ literacies.
I’ve already mentioned the difference between writing code (e.g. for a web page) and writing an essay. However, does a ‘text’ have to be ‘written’? Is there a literacy, a process of decoding and understanding, when it comes to dealing with images? There’s certainly a research base for the idea of visual literacy. Of course, as soon as we allow non-written artefacts to be equated with ‘literacy’ we open Pandora’s box. Visual literacy? Health literacy? Information literacy? Gardening literacy? Digital literacy?
There’s a related issue, which I won’t consider in much depth here, but which fascinates me, as to what extent the audience for your ‘writing’ has to be human. Think about essays being scanned in and being graded by robots; if no-one sentient ever reads what you have written, does it count as being the product of literacy? Do you count as your own audience — as with, for example, a daily journal?
As you can see, the concept of ‘literacy’ is problematic, even when understood traditionally. When we talk about literacy we’re talking about using a tool for a particular purpose. That purpose is to communicate with other people and, potentially, other things. When we add modifiers such as digital literacy into the mix, things get even more interesting.