Blog Post #2

It has been very interesting thinking about what social literacy is and the difference between social literacy and individual literacy. Social literacy is the standard of reading and writing that a community needs to meet in order to be considered “literate”. After reading through all of the essays, it seems that we don’t really have a good definition of what social literacy actually is or how to measure it. Every author struggled to come up with a standard that we could all follow, and there is no test to fairly and accurately measure everyone’s literacy against each other.

Another issue in determining social literacy is trying to set a standard of literacy for a community. Obviously the standard would vary depending on what community you are in. Even within one city, there are different standards for different people. Students in college are expected to have a higher level of literacy than high school graduates. It stands to reason that areas with higher literacy will become much more advanced and soar ahead of areas that have “less literacy”. This idea of social literacy seems to lead into a huge concern about making sure that we are literate enough. People are very concerned that children are advanced enough in reading and writing, which does seem like an important issue that we need to put effort into. Beyond that however, people’s concerns about literacy crises seem to be very vague.

One of the huge areas causing alarm that we have been able to pin down has to do with  the new slang that occurs when writing over social media sites. People seem to be extremely concerned that a new way of writing (some even call it a new dialect) will destroy our children’s literacy. Although this is a valid concern, studies among college students have shown that students are smart enough to know the difference between social situations and can figure out what kind of writing is appropriate to use in each one. It seems important that we emphasize the difference between the situations as part of our children’s education, but beyond that I don’t think there’s any huge cause for alarm. I would argue that most kids figure out how to speak to people in different situations, and this indicates that they would also know the difference between the people they are speaking to when they write as well.

Trying to draw clear lines regarding social literacy seems to be basically impossible. Instead, it seems like it would be more productive to focus on individual literacy and the idea of “functional literacy”. Functional literacy is specific to each individual and includes the set of skills that the individual needs to get through their day. In my mind, this is a much more important thing to focus on because after basic reading and writing skills, everyone has different needs to address. For example, I am employed at a law firm, and in order to do my everyday work I had to become literate in legal jargon and learn how to utilize legal databases and resources. This is incredibly important in my life and I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it, but to most people these skills would be completely unnecessary. Everyone has their own literacy needs, and it seems to me that if we try to ensure that everyone can read, write, and differentiate between social situations, then we don’t need to worry about placing the literacy bar in such an exact position. People will go on to gain knowledge in their own fields, and by doing so we can form a complete society where everyone is literate in the way that they need to be.