My brain hurts

If I got anything from Scribner’s article, it is that literacy, writing and reading, is probably the most convoluted thing to try to grasp in the world. This whole concept of “adapting a literary standard” amazes me, because it truthfully almost seems like a waste of time. Under “Literacy as Adaption”, she says, “Adapting literacy standards to today’s needs, personal or social, would be shortsighted.” I do not fully agree with this quote at all, because (from what I have gathered so far) is that literacy standards is trying to put into a simple term for what is, in reality, complicated. For example, the term illiterate is culturally not a good thing in American and people here tend to make fun of, feel sorry, even shun those who are so called “illiterate”. However, they are still making a living, doing things that maybe do not require them to read and write. In fact, what I have just described applies to a large chunk of the world’s population, which live just as credible lives as any of us. Still, I know it does not escape that being “illiterate” is become harder and harder for people to deal with in terms of the expansion of access to the internet and texting in the Western and more economically developed world. Nevertheless, that is still no write to stick them in a corner and name them something that people will use to make assumptions about them that may not be true.

I guess to wrap up, literacy cannot simply be the reading and writing that everyone assumes it is. Adapting literacy to anything is an automatic loose. I think we all need to view literacy as less of a standard and more of a way in which people communicate and understand each other, because all literacy is, is communication of thought, just with a different medium of doing so.