Are We Illiterate

Are We Illiterate

Literacy throughout history has been defined and redefined nearly as rapidly as new generations emerge. As we tread into the twenty first century, our generation moves to redefine literacy once again. However, unlike generations past, we are taking literacy and rapidly spanning it over new mediums that had been, until recently, unavailable. Advances in technology within the past twenty years have been so immense that the human race has literally packed up centuries of research, data, history and other information and moved it into the digital world, spawning a new necessity to have a general working knowledge of computing technologies. Mainstream society as a whole has concluded and accepted that in the twenty first century use of computers and application software will dictate most aspects of everyday life, therefore all but requiring the citizen of the new millennium to be literate in at least the most basic of computing technologies.

In it’s earliest forms literacy was purely the processes of interpreting symbols or hieroglyphics. Many ancient writings have been recovered and interpreted, undisputedly proving that literacy has, in some form, always existed. As time passed new forms of language and literature surfaced and literacy became known as “the ability to read and write.”1 Or, more specifically, one’s ability to convey one’s thoughts onto a medium understood by others. At first these mediums took the form of nearly anything: mankind has used anything from rocks to canvas. Eventually, with inventions such as the printing press, the mediums used by people became standardized and the definition of literacy was in no need of revision.

With the onslaught of technology brought on by the twentieth century, society began to accept new mediums over which to express themselves. Multimedia, the use of several different forms of media, has been becoming commonplace in everyday life since the advent of the internet, a world-wide conglomeration of computers networked together via telephone lines, optical wires, and satellite connections (among other forms of digital communication). Content of seemingly boundless quantities is available in nearly every household in the US thanks to the so-called “Information Super Highway.” To capitalize on such a useful resource requires that people of all ages be able to knowingly operate the appli...

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...be “productive” to be literate, as a person who understands the use of an application used for browsing the internet may also be literate while remaining completely unproductive.

Furthermore, if one was to separate, in a fittingly binary manor, the computer literate from the illiterate, who is to say which group is better off? Obviously being computer literate in the early twenty first century is not completely necessary, however, if ratios of computer literate to illiterate increase at so much as half the rate they have in the past twenty years it will not take long before society has firmly and implicitly declared that being computer literate is a necessity of everyday life. Will we ever see a time when those who are computer illiterate will be looked upon by the literate as ignorant, just as those who can not read are looked upon today? Perhaps it will be a generation not far in the future that decides that “literate” is ready to be redefined.

Bibliography:

Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary, (c)1978 Houghton Mifflin Co.

Ask.com, (c) 1995-2000 CNET Networks, Inc. College of Education, University of Houston: http://www.coe.uh.edu/insite/elec_pub/html1995/092.htm