Sponsorship and digital literacy is for me pretty cut and dry.  If a person is involved with Twitter, their sponsors would be other users of Twitter, or even the person who turned them onto Twitter in the first place.  Or back in my day when MySpace was the place to be, the big thing was to understand enough code to make your profile unrecognizable. At one point in time I had created my own top friends sections with clickable pictures that were given to me or that I took. Placed it on the opposite side and at one point in time in random places on the page. I also had a box to the side of the picture telling why they were so amazing.  In that case not only did my own literacy grow, but it was sponsored by other pages that had completely coded their pages and i saw what they did and wanted to also show my creativity in that way.

Do I know coding? No.  Can I put links in the right places to make coding that others made work? Yes.  I know no coding. I went to coding sites where i told them what kind of background i wanted and it did the coding for me.  Would I want to learn the coding myself in order to not depend on others? Sure!

It is the same for print based literacies as well. There are sponsors that can inspire a person to read or write, it just may not be done through the digital realm. Literacy if anything has many realms. Reading, writing, digital, street art, clothing, and television just to name a few.

I have tried twitter at one point and i lost interest.  I didn’t understand the point in it and I still believe that the “hashtag” should still be called the pound sign.  If I were to learn something new it would definitely be coding.  It just seems like it will be something that will be here long after the hashtag has died a long, slow, and painful death.

Is it obvious I’m not a fan of it being called a hashtag?

My original idea was to talk to my grandmother about this.  I tried and it just did not work. So then I figured i have a cousin I will ask him his thoughts on literacy.

 

Me: Do you know what books are?

J: Oh djo

Me: you just like the light don’t you?

J: ohh yo

Me: So you really like books ?

J: ohidis osdjoah … is doeas isdoa

Me: So amazing!

J: oos dos… is doe …is does doe eo

Me: That is so awesome!

J: -dances around-

 

While it was entertaining interviewing an 18 month old i knew i was getting nowhere. So i turned focus to his mother.

Me: So no I am going to ask similar questions with a change in the wording. When J gets older are you going to tell him about your efforts to learn to read and write?

K: Oh yeah!. I’m going to tell him like how it was a lot harder for us to learn to read and write. Well you had a lot of teachers who work with you and stuff I pretty sure by the time he’s in school there is not going to be one on one time there to help him read. I know that it is most likely going to go onto me.  I’m going to try to teach him the importance of reading.

I was quite interested in the area of Hamilton’s article of what i will call “Literacy as” . The multiple forms literacy could be included in the article were Threat, Defiance, Evidence, Accessory, Display, and Ritual Public Gesture. While it is always much easier to go about something like this when there is a clear definition of what literacy is, if i have learned anything it is that there is no clear and all inclusive definition that everyone goes by and accepts.

Literacy as Display is meant to signify “individual or group identity”. This is very prominent today, with the invention of social media platforms.  The definition of literacy has changed over time, and so has society’s ways of making this happen. Take the Keep Calm movement into social media. I have more of an interest in the original Keep Calm and Carry On propaganda. Then again I have an interest in British culture. As people added different things to it, has it become its own form of propaganda? An image meant to bring people together and separate those who are true to the cause (be it Doctor Who or buying shoes) from those who are not.

I didn’t get into or even understand the idea of the display until i was nearly twenty-two. That was when i was convinced to get a Facebook, and even then it was not filled with memes or other forms of entertainment based pictures. It was people taking on an imaginary wall. As I got deeper into the black hole that is Facebook, i found them all. “Keep calm and watch SuperWhoLock”. I still wonder if there is a secret organization that is gonna mix all three of these shows.  “One does not simply define Literacy”.  I don’t know if that exists if not theres an idea for someone. Those are just the ones I can remember at the moment. Because there are more ways to display our literacy, it is not just on hats, shirts, bags, cups, and the idea that brand name articles of clothing can act as a display of literacy. It is everywhere, and you never know what you’re gonna get.

So I wanted to get this down before I forgot about everything. In Friday’s class, my pod brought up an interesting subject within literacy that, with all of the talk about literacy it still seems to be an odd duck.  Texting and what it is doing to our literacy levels.  Now texting is something that is read like a book but there is something lacking from texting that literature has successfully kept over the years. The ability to access emotion.

For example I am currently reading Pride and Prejudice. I can read the text and come to an emotional conclusion, much like a movie.  Texting lacks this in a major way.  I have a friend that if I do not add a smiley face, a “haha”, or a “lol” at the end she automatically thinks i am mad at her, then i have to convince her otherwise.  That need to do that with her has spread out to other text messages where I may not actually need to do that otherwise. While text messages can be understood within the context of the conversation, the context of emotional range is lacking.

Texting is a literacy in itself, it can be read, understood, and it has its own written language. The “BRB, LOL, TTYL, ILY” to name a few, has even come into the speaking realm. I have heard people I know tell me in person “LOL”.  Of course I look at them and ask why they said that, they’re not actually laughing.  The usual response to something like, this is that they are so use to texting it that it has come out in their speech.  I am one that does not use the chatspeak that so many of the younger generations are use to.  I can understand the use of chatspeak with the old school Nokia phones that if you wanted a “S” you had to press a button four times. With the Invention of smart phones there is no necessity for chatspeak anymore, since smart phones come equipped  with a full keyboard.

Younger generations text quite a bit, but what is all of this texting doing to their literacy levels? I think there is is a very real possibility that if the use of chatspeak and substituting words for letter such as “r” instead or “are” continue when there is now no actually need for them, that the overall levels of literacy may go down. Even in the Szwed’s article it mentioned that America, being a first world country is not as concerned with literacy as some other countries.  Literacy is something that we should be concerned with. The more I see this chatspeak, a language invented out of necessity, in a world that no longer needs it the more i think of the possibility that in some ways we are going backwards instead of forwards.  I will agree that literacy is more than just reading and writing, but there has got to be a limit to how much of this we are willing to accept.

I will also agree that a person can be literate in some things and not others. This sort of chatspeak however, in its wide range, will not help when they attempt to get a job or head further into the academic world.