Literally Literate: How the idea of literacy has spread beyond the act of writing

Literacy Meme

A literacy meme that says “oh so think literacy is just reading and writing?” across the top and “tell me how that’s going for you” across the bottom.

Whether in class or in the real world, we have all heard terms such as “digital literacy”,  “financial literacy” or even more.  Alberta Education defines literacy as “the ability, confidence and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct and communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living”. In this definition, we see how the idea of literacy has expanded beyond just the act of writing.

Examples of types of literacy

An image depicting types of literacy, such as information, technology, and data literacy.

Literacy has become shorthand for being able to navigate the complex systems that surround us. While in schools we still emphasize reading and writing the most, it is well documented that we need many literacies to become socially engaged citizens. As seen in Scribner and Cole’s “Literacy without schooling: Testing for intellectual effects”, literacy has long been entwined with schooling and therefore cognitive development. Researchers such as Scribner and Cole have pushed back on this, but in the modern American education system, one needs literacy to pursue education.

Student with book

A student being handed a book by a teacher.

So what does the extrapolation of the term literacy say about how we culturally view the act of literacy? First, it emphasizes the connection between literacy and schooling. The idea one has to be “financially literate” in order to grow your financial resources is just one parallel to this theory. With this new definition and new terms, we see an even greater conflation of literacy and schooling. To be literate in a topic is to be educated on it as well as being able to navigate complex situations surrounding a given form of literacy.

Second, we see an increase in the divides between traditionally literate and non-literate persons. As many of these types of literacies still need reading and writing skills to learn and use, one has to be traditionally literate to pursue many of these new types of literacy, especially those lower in socioeconomic status. Digital literacy can be economically uplifting, but one has to pursue knowledge via already established literacy skills, such as reading tutorials or blog posts. With the internet, we see a greater challenge for non-literate people to overcome.

What does this mean for students? Does this evolving definition mean that students who are being taught literacy have more on their plate? In my opinion, I think this rather shows people opening up the “right to literacy” to more skillsets. We all need a complex understanding to navigate our increasingly complex world, and everyone has a right to learn these other types of literacies as well. This is why we see iPad tutorials for elderly populations, or financial advice nonprofits. Like traditional literacy, arming people with these skills allow them to transcend the barriers that keep them down, and become politically and socially aware of the world around them. People have a right to knowledge of the systems around them, and the expansion of the term literacy is just one example of that growing belief.

Being a Good Reader Doesn’t Make You Better

As someone who prides themselves on being a “good” reader, (as in, being able to quickly read and digest anything of written variety) I am here to tell both myself and everyone else who thinks they’re a good reader, I’m sorry. But we are not any better than those who are not.

I say this not in terms of scientific evidence, but instead in terms of cultural norms. As a child, I was told that I was extremely smart (and therefore, superior) because I always had my nose buried in a book. This gave me a sort-of complex.

I think we all have some of this complex. I mean, we’ve all laughed at places with misspelled signs.

I mean… who wouldn’t find this funny?

But I would like to point out that in this humor, we are looking down upon the person who wrote the sign and the business that flaunts it.

In the Goody & Watts article, “The Consequences of Literacy”, they wrote, “China, therefore, stands as an extreme example of how, when a virtually non-phonetic system of writing becomes sufficiently developed to express a large number of meanings explicitly, only a small and specially trained professional group in the total society can master it, and partake of the literate culture” (313).

I’d like to extend on what they were saying… All literate societies do this. The better one can read and write, the more esteemed they are in the culture. And the worse one is at reading and writing, the less important their life (or business) is.

Think of how we view people with high school diplomas versus people with PhD’s. And oh, man. Think about how we view people without a high school diploma.

This establishes a sort of caste system of human worth among the participants in each literate culture. In America, we value individuals with higher education way more than we do those who “work at McDonalds”.

There is a fatal flaw in this, one much more damming than figuring out that being a good reader does not make you better.

We have used this cultural expectation as a way to exploit impoverished and minority groups. 

As discussed in “The Right to be Literate: Literacy, Education, and the School-To-Prison Pipeline” by Winn, et al., “Childhood poverty, the lack of early childhood education, and the denial of a college-preparatory K-12 education promoting critical literacies have contributed to producing what has been referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline” (148).

The school-to-prison pipeline is a very disturbing truth about lower-income areas and how children are systemically pushed out of schools and into prisons, successfully ruining their chances at getting out of poverty.

It is something that will occupy a very separate blog post. But what I need you to know is that the people who “work at McDonalds” are people too. They are, in fact, just as much of a person as your general physician.

We need to be aware of how our own biases, such as believing that our literacy makes us superior humans, is a part of a system that is used to discriminate against minority groups.

So, basically, I hate to break it to you. But your ability to read Stephen King’s It in one week does not make you any better than someone who could never read the book at all. The movie was quite a good adaptation, and they can get everything they need to know from there.

Change starts small. I beg you all to be aware of your own biases and how they contribute to the world around you. So that maybe one day, we can live in an equal and just world.

How the Pandemic Has Changed Classroom Etiquette: Will In-Person Class be the Same?

A couple weeks ago, I was logged in my Colonial and US Literature Zoom class when the chat started blowing up.  A number of my classmates were engaging with the material in a nonconventional way. They were memeing with the class content.

Watching the events of class unfold got me thinking about how the pandemic has revolutionized school. Students wouldn’t say what they were saying in the chat in an actual classroom. In less than a year, a new school etiquette has formed.

Now with school being done virtually, students log in, mute themselves and turn off their camera. A lot of the time, the only person visible to the class is the professor. Hardly any students speak in class; the professor talks to black screens with student’s names. The chat feature is popular and contributing to the class via chat is acceptable now.

While ruminating about online class, I began to worry about the eventual transition back to normal, unrestricted in-person classes.

There is no chat feature in the classroom. Students cant mute themselves, turn off the camera and walk away. Will students be able to sit around others, look them in the eye and participate in person? I sure do hope so.

Nicholas Carr discusses the internet and it’s implications on our brain and life in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr addresses some concerns about the internet that I share. He too fears that humans have become too reliant on the internet, and in effect, humans do not perform intellectually like they used too. But thankfully Carr also offers us hope. Habits learned from the internet are not permanent:

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

I’m sure we will readapt and adopt a classroom environment similar to before, but perhaps we won’t. Either way our brain will adapt, and school will go on.

Imagine: (Y/N) Wrote A Blog Post

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be in a toxic relationship with your favorite singer? Or day-dreamed about how your favorite show would play out if your favorite characters finally started dating? Welcome to fanfiction, my friend.

Fanfiction is a genre of writing that uses other sourced characters or realities. The authors of these works engage with the community of fans to expand the “narrative universe.”

When I was 13, I fell hard for Harry from One Direction. After watching every 1D music video on the internet, a picture came across my Tumblr timeline.

Tumblr introduced me to imagines and other short fanfiction writings like one-shots and flashfics. Eventually, I came across a post linked to wattpad.com and thus, my addiction to fanfiction (sorry, I had to). I devoured thousands of words about the relationships and manipulated worlds of my favorite celebrities and fictional characters. The best part was it was written by other teenage girls that knew exactly what I wanted to read. 

In my opinion, fanfiction birthed a new generation of writers. For some reason though, fanfiction is usually dismissed as amateur or obsessive because it is popular with teenage girls. Even if it’s not good writing, it’s still a worthy expression of creativity. Also, how do you manage to make sexist comments about simply liking things?

Many fic authors also write professionally. (P.S. Fifty Shades of Grey is a Twilight Fanfic.) Fanfics fill the void between new content, and sometimes even the backstories of the content they source from. The summer I spent devouring After — by the pool, or under my desk, or literally, anywhere I could use my phone — changed me as a reader, and a human being. 8 years later, there’s a book series and film-adaptation of the toxic Harry Styles fanfic.

 

Although a generation of young teens should not have had unrestricted internet access, a rich and diverse writing culture was born. Since the pandemic has started, fanfiction has seen a spike in popularity again. After all, fanfiction is there for you when no one else is.

 

Stock Market Shenanigans and Societal Use of Tokens in the Digital Era

Hey ya’ll!

So, in case any of you haven’t noticed, the stock market has been buzzing lately. To summarize, young amateurs and ordinary folk have banded together to stick it to the man on Wall Street in retaliation for a shady practice called shorting. Here’s a meme courtesy of the users of r/wallstreetbets explaining the situation for rubes like me who don’t know jack about stock trading:

Power to the people! But putting aside our jubilance at the suffering of Wall Street for a minute, this Gamestop phenomenon is a prime example of some of the rapid changes that our sweeping our society as well as all of humanity, particularly pertaining to our evolving use of tokens. If you’re scratching your head and wondering what on Earth it is that I’m referring to, check out the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat!

The basic gist is that since the dawn of civilization, we humans have always used some sort of tool to represent money and/or resources, which Denise Schmandt-Besserat refers to as tokens. In the beginning, we mostly used pebbles or clay figures to to keep track of our economies. Then we progressed to writing and pebbles and clay figures were gradually phased out. Then we began to mint coins and print the dollar bills that are ubiquitous today. And now, we see another form of token on the rise: digital currency.

The stock market is a prime example of digital currency; it exists as a data point rather than a physical object that you can touch like a pebble or a dollar bill. As our society digitizes, so to is our use of tokens. Pretty soon, we might evolve to a point where all of our tokens are digital, and we have a cashless society. This stock market business is only the beginning! Much to think about!

 

Too Poor to Have Your Incredible Movement Make Millions? No Longer!

From shells and clay to “Reddit” and GameStop, writing has become cheaper and increasing democratizing. Systems of writing have progressed through an incredible number of technologies that have made writing more affordable throughout history.

A system of shells and clay indentations surely was an expensive system of writing, reserved for those who stood to make money in Susa. It seems unlikely that any political activists of Susa could have afforded to copy their essay on thousands of clay tablets.

Fast forward to the Printing Press of 1440. Suddenly ideas worth sharing like the Bible are no longer for those who can afford handwritten copies. It did not take long in human history, for activists to realize how writings like the Bible can catch fire at an affordable price.

Benjamin Franklin and many other enlightenment activists, although wealthy, now can actually spread their ideas such as revolting against unfair taxation. If the founding fathers wrote on clay tablets, it is likely that America would have remained a British colony.

 

The 20th century is where writing became about as cheap as it is today. Your average person could still afford to print their own pamphlets, and books had become cheaper than ever. But only large conglomerations like newspapers possessed the wealth and power to insight national change from writing.

Truly, all important speeches, announcements, etc. came filtered through the individual agendas of newspaper cooperation. Perhaps the phrasing “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats” found on the front page of the Washington Post on Oct 10, 1972, could sway readers against Nixon before even understanding the situation.

Despite how cheap printing had become, newspaper companies remained in control of what was written and read by their massive audiences of voters. In other words, the proletariat was still being told what to think by those who could afford to tell them.

Fast forward to Jan 25, 2021. Extremely cheap online writing and communication have finally hit their stride. Communicating and writing on the forum “Reddit” if you look in the correct places is nearly entirely free, for example, a library computer. There the proletariat can finally discuss ideas to audiences of millions in a manner they can afford. This free passage of writing has brought greater coordination of free people than Ben Franklin could have ever imagined.  A subsection of Reddit, called “r/wallstreetbets,” created a proposition to topple the ability of the wealthy to control written narratives. Their success has once and for all proven that accessibility to writing can take power from the rich and give it to the poor.

Many articles have been written about the “wallstreetbets” GameStop short squeeze. But this will summarize the impact it has had on democracy through writing. Large firms and wealthy people were the only ones knowledgeable and rich enough to make significant money off of failing businesses in the past. “Wallstreetbets” was able to effectively counter these billionaires’ trade strategies and make even more from those billionaires. But “Wallstreetbets” is a group of millions of less wealthy people. So, the only way to effectively counter, as proposed before, is through cheap and mass communication. Only by being brought together through this communication could the proletariat have taken money, and control of what is perceived as possible from the rich and coordinate their movement. That is something that could never have been accomplished without technological and economic advancements on the clay tablet.

Science fiction becomes science reality

Fiction may be a useful tool for processing dilemmas, but what do we do when an author’s imagination becomes reality?A woman's head seems to protrude from a space ship

In 1969, American science fiction writer, Anne McCaffrey, imagined a future dystopia where governments melded human mind with machine so that those deemed unworthy had a function in society. Her story focuses on Helva, a compelling character who becomes the “brain” of a starship and completes missions alongside a pilot. The story’s first line, “She was born a thing,” immediately probes how our society’s preoccupation with gendering affects our relationship with technology.

You may not have read “The Ship Who Sang” or its subsequent series Brain & Brawn, but McCaffrey’s world might still remind you of technologies that exist today.

Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are two examples of gendered-feminine technology. And in 2018, Heather Suzanne Woods studied the phenomenon of gendered technology using the rhetorical concept of persona, or the character that’s presented or perceived by others.

As virtual assistants for home and for work, Alexa and Siri mobilize traditional stereotypes of femininity. Specifically, Woods points to persistent conceptions of femininity related to homemaking, caretaking and administrative labor. McCaffrey’s story likewise provokes the idea that woman and machine have the same capacity to function as utilities.

This concept of “digital domesticity” is powerful because it reworks femininity into technology to connect what’s familiar about the past/present to the unfamiliar future landscape. But in doing so, we egg on problematic gender stereotypes.

If we look to McCaffrey’s story, there isn’t a happy ending…

Ted Chiang and Fictional Examples of Concepts Considered in English 4574

So far in English 4574, my classmates and I have read about all sorts of science-fiction-sounding concepts. Wood’s ideas about the incorporation of artificially intelligent virtual assistants into our daily lives (think Siri, Alexa). The idea that picto-, ideo-, and logograms are all unique ways humans communicate, as discussed by Schmandt-Besserat. Young people’s increasing reliance on “smart” or assistive technology like word processors as showcased by Grabhill et all.

If you’re anything like me, then you might feel that although these concepts are intriguing to consider, they’re sometimes difficult to imagine happening. Either that, or their consequences have yet to fully play out in our world. We as a society are still in the throes of dozens of issues like the ones above. Issues of privacy, memory, self-expression, and communication all tied up in the realms of English composition, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and probably more to come. We’re living through history. The issues discussed by the academics we read are ours to tackle.

But, again, if you’re anything like me, you don’t exactly know where to start. Or, you think the issues themselves are interesting–entertaining, even–and want to read more about them. Allow me to introduce you to the works of Ted Chiang.

Ted Chiang is an American author famous for his thought-provoking science fiction short stories and novellas. Amazon.com: Arrival 11x17 Inch Movie POSTER: Posters & PrintsYou might be familiar with the movie version one of his more famous works: Arrival. The movie is based on Chiang’s short story titled “The Story of Your Life.” The plot centers around a linguistics professor named Louise Banks who is tasked with deciphering the complex language of aliens who have just arrived in Earth’s orbit. The story delves into ideas about cultural anthropology, the three “-grams”, and the paradigms of memory.

But wait! There’s more! Chiang has written two collections worth of short stories over the course of his career, and language/communication seems to be a favorite topic of his. His story “Seventy-Two Letters” dives into archaic ideas of names having intrinsic power. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” is a twist on our usual artificial intelligence story: instead of Siri or Alexa, scientists create semi-sentient digital “pets” called Digients. The story examines how humans interact with and treat these Digients, and what that says about us.

My favorite of Chiang’s language-related stories is probably “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction”. This story harkens back to Plato’s ideas about memory and writing, but brings these concepts into a fictionalized version of our not-so-distant future. Characters in the story use a technology called Remem as a sort of constant life log. Every moment of their lives is recorded and sorted into categories, essentially externalizing human memory; exactly what Plato feared.

TLDR: Chiang’s stories provide excellent examples of the sorts of concepts we’ve been considering in class. Chiang’s prose is characteristically moving and lyrical while simultaneously drawing upon real scientific theories. If you haven’t read any of his work before, I highly recommend you do.

 

Let’s be genuine about how we (re)write histories

When I say AAC device what comes to mind? Is it the device? The technology? …Or the human who uses it?

Okay, I admit that was a bit unfair of me. I mean, I literally put “device” right in the question; it’s only natural for you to have thought of that first. But the point I’m making here is poignant nonetheless: that sometimes even the companies who design, make, and sell these pricey communication technologies think about the person second—or third or fourth or last—to the device.

Don’t just take my word for it. Meryl Alper draws attention to this issue in her think piece on the development of AAC devices. Notably, she says,

“[T]he history of AAC sheds light on the inexorable, but understudied links between the history of communication technologies and disability history… Individuals with various disabilities need to be recovered from and rewritten into the history of how communication technologies are designed, marketed, and adopted.”

When she says technologies, she refers to all means of writing and communicating. Not just the ones that are augmentative or alternative.

And when she says history she’s not just talking about days of yore. This is salient—this is now.

But this issue obviously isn’t isolated to AAC. Companies, researchers, and consumers consistently and persistently “forget” the humans behind the technologies.

For anyone who’s accidentally spent hours perusing #wokewashing, you know how real and fraught this product-over-person mentality is. (And just to address the students and teachers real quick, these issues crop up even in the classroom. Check this article out.)

Putting the human back into anything that has been systematically scrubbed of specific people’s presence is no easy job. So how do we go about “recovering” and “rewriting” like Alper suggests?

Musk is on his way to the Moon, and the Internet is Bringing all Eyes to the Stock Market

Elon Musk has definitive plans to go to Mars, as is reflected in his company’s mission statement: https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/. But he’s also been incredibly supportive of one company’s meteoric rise in value. Currently, Gamestop (GME), a company that should, by all accounts, be fading from society like Blockbuster, is worth 7000% more than it was a year ago. The biggest news this week has not been the change in presidency, nor covid, nor even GM’s plan to go entirely electric by 2035. No, it’s on a battle between a hedge fund and a subreddit community. And the funniest part is that Elon Musk is influencing both the attention and the value. His tweets about it started on the 26th, with but one word, “Gamestonk!!”, and a link to the community r/wallstreetbets, Musk’s tweet was followed by a 60% rise in GME’s value. Musk’s use of memes is not new, and he even tweeted “Who controls the memes, controls the universe” at some time last year.

The community he linked to is a combination of organized disaster, memes, and interest in the stock market. A many headed hydra that jumps between chanting “diamond hands” and yelling “to the moon,” either directly or through emoji. It’s a community dedicated to the latter’s discussion, and at the moment it’s in a small war with Melvin Capital, using purchased shares of GME. The hedge fund has already lost more than five billion to independent investors (many of whom are a part of the subreddit). The news, general public, and other hedge funds are now looking at the fight with interest both economical and educational. Already questionable practices have arisen in the response of the mobile application ‘Robinhood’, and people are learning words and phrases like ‘short squeeze,’ ‘market manipulation,’ and just how similar the Stock Market is to gambling (and indeed, many in the community refer to themselves as degenerate gamblers with pride).

The interesting thing is just how many people are watching the news, hearing these words, and going to their best source of information for, well… more information. For some it’s a friend or family member who works in the industry, for others it’s the internet. Two weeks ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between an option and a stock (and honestly it’s still kind of hazy), but the scary thing is that gambling doesn’t require you to understand the odds, or even the words that people use to describe the odds. The scary thing is the number of people not going out looking for information, but for a quick buck. In ’08 the housing burst ruined millions of lives, and that was the interest of the banks against people. Now it’s the interests of hedge funds against people, and like banks, the hedge funds are much more informed and supported than the average American. It reminds me that it’s important to remember “Never bet on a sure thing unless you can afford to lose.”