Literary as Social

I never thought about literacy being “social”. Until recently, I have always connected being literate to being good at English. And when I say “being good at English”, I mean being good at reading and writing. I grew up in a town where a good percentage of my school did not know how to read English or even speak it very well, so to be literate there was to be good at those two basic functions of every-day life. Kind of sad, but true. When I read Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy”, I realized that being literate goes beyond being good at reading and writing. It’s much more complicated than that, and it’s also more social than that. I had an individualistic view of literacy by narrowing it down to reading books in class and writing a good essay. All of my notions of literacy were connected to scholastic fetes. I never thought about the every-day use of literacy or the sponsors that have helped me develop difference categories of literacy. When I started thinking of them I had a huge list. There are my social sponsors, such as teachers, parents, educational programs on television, Facebook, Instagram, my Iphone that can do pretty much anything, texting (which I boycotted for a very long time before I realized I like writing messages as opposed to talking on the phone) and, of course, college. Then I thought beyond those and realized I have a different kind of literacy- work. Since 18 years old I have worked in a doctor’s office and was responsible for writing medical reports and billing insurance. As I said in class, medical lingo is like it’s own secret language. There’s all these abbreviations and really long, really hard-to-pronounce words that when I first looked at a medical report it was like looking at a document written in hieroglyphics. But I got good at it and have learned to pronounce really hard medical terms, such as, “The patient is experiencing Atrial Pulmonary disfunction” (I don’t really know if that is a term used. Now I work for a recycling facility and use literacy in a difference way. I have to know all the rules of disposing of waste, the correct verbage to use on E-waste reports and what Ferrous and Non-Ferrous metals mean.

I digress. All of this “realization” came after reading Scribner’s article. When Scribner wrote, “people’s literate skills have grown vulnerable to unprecedented turbulence in their economic value, as conditions, forms and standards of literacy achievement seem to shift with almost every new generation of learners” (pg1), I realized that I have three difference forms of literacy: Social literacy, work literacy, and scholastic literacy. And I have the ability to recognize the environment appropriate for each form. I think that is true for a lot of people in my generation and especially for the generations after me. It is quite amazing, in my opinion, that kids are able to subconsciously recognize their environment and automatically switch gears. It is amazing that they are exposed to so many different kinds of sponsors of literacy. It assures me that we will never end up like society in the movie “Idocracy” (which is a great fear of mine).