#5 literacy of our generation.

         Literacy, “the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently, and think critically about the written word.” (Wikipedia). It is a skill that an individual needs to have this ability to communicate with the society (used on our daily life from at school and work to little things like texting and sending / receiving an email). Its necessity is vary depends on the different situation, culture, society, people and so on. 
         As technology advanced, our form or literacy also has been changed, and it is causing some literacy concerns for some people. As I mentioned in the previous blog post “The evolution of reading”, and only so in Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and Chris Hedges’s “American the Illiterate.” Hedges’s and Carr’s opinion was that people started to read online short stories that only summarized essential information, and it led people to gain more amount of information, but it brought down the level of their literacy, because people these days can not tolerate big literary works such as War and Peace and Hamlet.

           While Hedges and Carr has negative opinions about the literacy of our current generation, Scribner and Thompson has positive thoughts about how the literacy is changing. In the essay, “Our Semi-literate Youth?  Not So Fast” , Thompson says the technology development is helping us to improve our literacy. His reasoning are “the length of student writing has increased nearly three-fold in these 25 years”, “the ratio of errors to number of words has remained stable not just for twenty-five years but for the last 100 years.”, and also the autocorrect helps with students spelling problems. He proved that people are aware of what style they need to use depends on whom they are speaking to, and the technology helped people to be able to do that (e.g. texting a friend and writing a paper to submit to professor). Scribner says literacy is “individual abilities”, “social achievement; individuals in societies without writing systems do not become literate”, “an outcome of cultural transmission”.  It is an individual activity so there is no way to measure whether our literacy level has been decreased or not. I thought Carr and Hedges’s opinions were extremely limited to certain types of people when Scribner and Thompson’s ideas were applicable to more broad people. Scribner uses metaphors to define her definition of literacy: “Literacy as adaptation, literacy as power, and literacy as a state of grace”. It seems to me that she thinks the usage and the meaning of literacy can be different from places to places and from people to people, but at the end It can all contribute to improve out literacy education.

           From all these essays, articles and in class discussion, I concluded that our most pressing literacy concern is that there are a certain amount of people who cannot access or take advantage of our technology to improve their literacy, and holding all of us back.