Multitude of 21st Century Literacies
As I sit in front of my computer struggling to define what exactly it means to be literate in the 21st century, I realize that the very nature of literacy is what makes it so hard to define. Asking someone to define literacy is like asking someone what shape the ocean is; clearly they can’t really give you an answer as it is always changing and shifting based on the tides and weather. Literacy mirrors the ocean’s shifting form in the sense that it is forever evolving and becoming more nuanced, except rather than the tides and weather causing these shifts, literacy is constantly changed by the technology humans’ use in their everyday life. An example of the definition of literacy changing alongside technology is how the word became defined once the printing press was released. Upon the invention of printed text, literacy took on the meaning of being able to read and interact with a written text, and as the Mobile Digital Arts group points out, before the invention of the printing press it is likely orators and story tellers were seen as having some form of literacy.
All of this is to give a fair warning that while I know what 21st century literacy means to me today, the ever advancing technology could change literacy’s meaning to me tomorrow. Understanding this is key to grasping what it truly means to be literate in an constantly advancing world, because to view literacy as “set in stone” would be failing to realize that “To be successful in today’s digital world, literacy goes far beyond being able to read and write” (US Digital Literacy, 2016). Literacy in the 21st century is being able to interact appropriately in different real life and online forums while also being able to use prior technological knowledge to start at a high level of proficiency.
One thing that today’s literacy stresses is all the different contexts in which we as human display varying levels of literacy. Rebecca Alber (2013) details the many ways literacy can be seen when she lists goals of 21st century literacy that range from “gain proficiency with tools of technology” all the way to “develop relationships with others and confront and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally”. These two goals of 21st century literacy are important to me because I think they capture the wide variety of ways literacy can be used. Focusing on the second quote, I believe this excerpt is extremely useful as it shows the ways that literacy is used in relationships all of the time. For instance, I am fairly socially literate, so I understand that while it may be okay to refer to my roommate as “bro” in our house, it would not be okay for me to address my professor as “bro” during a lecture. Even though this may seem like simple social skills, I am actually using contextual evidence to analyze both situations and come to a conclusion about how I should act. In the same way a skilled reader can extract some meaning from a novel, I too extract meaning from my surroundings and choose to act in a way that is appropriate for the current setting.
The same can be said in the virtual spaces we inhabit, as there is certainly a literacy associated with these spaces in the same way there is a literacy for real world spaces. Think about it. How many times have you logged into Facebook and seen a relative posting something that just makes you shake your head. For instance, anytime my mom wants to show me something on Facebook, she just reposts it with the caption “Look at this Connor!” without tagging me or sending it to me. To anyone who is literate in how to use Facebook this is clearly a huge faux pas, as she not only fails to post it in a way that makes Facebook alert me, but she also forces all of her friends to view a post they likely do not care about.
What my mom lacks is any sort of prior knowledge on the use of social media, and it shows in her literacy on Facebook. Having spent more of my life with a Facebook account than without, I am afforded a heightened literacy in Facebook as well as other, newer social media platforms. But the most interesting thing to me is the fact that my literacy with these platforms grows at an astonishingly higher rate than that of my moms. Certainly if a new social media app were to come out tomorrow, I would master the mechanics of the app at a much faster rate than my mom.
This ability to connect prior knowledge in a subject area to similar but new experiences is a key factor of 21st century literacy. The most interesting thing however is the wide variety of activities this pertains to. While I may be miles ahead of my mom in social media literacy, she is light years ahead of me in her culinary literacy. In the same style of thought experiment involving a new app coming out and my mom and I’s race to master it, if we were given a new recipe to follow, her finished product would be superior in every way to mine. This demonstrates the variety of ways literacy can be assigned and perceived in the 21st century, as it shows the ways all of us have deficits in certain areas while thriving in others. The RSA, a company dedicated to improving the way we think, agrees it is wholly necessary to form a non-dichotomist view of literacy that does more than differentiate between who can read and who cannot, because with this view it is possible to form a society that celebrates everyone’s strengths instead of making two categories of “literate” and “illiterate”.
