Literacy is Gr8

“What the hell does brb mean?” 14 year old me after getting a text from a friend. Let’s be honest we all have had to stop and try to decode jumbles of letters. I never had the guts to ask a friend what something stood for. I mean who wants to look stupid? My generation has been constantly put down and made fun of for texting, twitter, etc. And I believed them. I was ashamed of myself, my brothers and my sisters. Oh no! We’re not reading enough!

No, we’re just not reading the same way you were.

What I’ve come to understand is that this idea of literacy is constantly changing. What was literacy 400 years ago? The bible? They’d be terrified for your literacy if they saw you reading a magazine article and saying things such as ‘totally’. We are not in a crisis. We are creating a new language and learning to switch from a casual speech to formal literature. Jesse Stommel has addressed that when we text we are aware of everything we do. “He or she is aware of the ways that text-message-speak distorts Standard English — aware, in fact, to the point of revelry” (Stommel). There’s more gain than loss. I can easily go from reading a text to reading Sense and Sensibility. Just as Brandt has stated that we are piling all of this new information of old and new into us.

Yes, somethings have been damaged from our new form of literacy but we have also gained some new abilities. So I am not ashamed anymore. I am astonished that I am a part of this movement in literacy. I have gone from writing notes to friends to texting. I have gone from writing small formal papers to blogging for homework. Every day I go to class I am truly blown away with this new lenses. We are gaining a new form of literacy and we need to understand what exactly is going on. My biggest question is how should we utilize this if this new form of literacy isn’t so bad?