Reading, Seeing, Writing, and Literacy

 1/22/23

Literacy in a seemingly illiterate world. 

Learning is the act of understanding that which has not been understood before. It develops in many ways. I offer the example of a student of theater. Theater students learn about theater by doing theater (acting), researching theater, and they learn about it by listening to experts speak about it. Only one out of those three facets of their education explicitly involves language. But only the most literate out of those students will be able to get something out of all three of those learning methods. So what am I really talking about when I talk about "literacy"?

It actually reminds me of a question I was asked when I was getting my Bachelor's in Literature a million years ago. It was my first day in the American Literature class and the teacher asked us to define literature. Everybody wrote down their answers. I was the first one to put down my pen. When it came time for us to read our answers out loud I remember a few people had answers along the lines of:

"Literature is the culmination of knowledge passed down from...." 

"Literature means important books that talk about important and culturally relevant thoughts..." 

"Literature is the classics which means they encompass the human condition...." 

And then my answer was: 

"Literature is anything that's written down." 

I thought I could hear people hissing in the rows behind me. Hissing like they just discovered a paper cut by pouring lemon juice on their finger. Our professor had this smile that spread across her face as slowly as a half-frozen snake uncoils. She asked the rest of the class if anyone agreed with me. Obviously there was total silence. But I knew what I was doing. I knew that walking into a 300 level literature class and saying that anything that has words on it belongs in the same category as Nabokov and Twain was practically the same thing as going to a live performance on Handel's Messiah and holding a lighter above my head at all the sad bits. It was no surprise that my classmates had much loftier ideas about what "literature" was. My professor asked me to explain why I thought the advertisement on a McDonalds bag had any literary value to it. So I told her what I knew. 

"Anything that gives the reader an insight into the culture that produced it is considered literature." 

Allow me to elaborate: If archeologists find a Mickey D's bag that has a picture of a hamburger on it, they're going to know we were a meat-eating culture. They are going to know we had a economy based around agriculture. They are also going to know that there was a difference between the people who cooked the food and the people who ate the food. People didn't always cook for themselves. Which sheds more light on our economy. They will also know we convinced each other to consume food based on its flavor and not its nutritional content. 

That's just from a bag. Imagine what we could learn from the User's Manual of a Subaru. 

As I defended by stance, I started to realize that the frosty viper of a smile that my professor had on her face was not aimed at me. It was actually aimed at the rest of my classmates. 

Literacy is the ability to understand what we see when we must interpret a visual message. 

Literacy as a social practice is an important aspect of life in a world where everywhere we look, we find words. Literally everywhere we look. Billboards, traffic signs, graffiti. A social practice, to me, means it is a method of communication, or a method of understanding. There are two sides to a conversation: the speaker and the listener. Therefore in the written world there is the writer, or producer of text, and the reader or person who sees the message. The more culturally competent a person is, the more meaningful the exchanges. For example: if I send my friend this emoji: 🍆 it's going to be about something different than if I send it to my dad. In fact, about three weeks ago, I thought that emoji only had one meaning. I'm pretty sure the people who made that emoji didn't mean it to become what it did, but in our world there is meaning, and then there is meaning-making. We are all meaning makers as well as meaning receivers. Symbols and words take on different meanings as people add their own experiences to the words. In this way being "literate" does not mean being able to read, but being able to understand the meanings behind the words read. Literacy, therefore, is a method of reflection. Reflection is a process by which we become conscious observers of the world around us. It is the way we are able to build understanding of things that are outside of us, be they people, or events, or symbols. Literacy is knowing that if your 80 year old aunt who never married tells you she is going on a seniors date night, "🍆" is not the best symbol to send her, and for various reasons. 

In this manner, the social activity called "literacy" is about opening oneself up to the possibility that there is no wasted message, that everything that is created by other people has some sort of value. It doesn't matter if it's a Big Mac wrapper, or "The Crying of Lot 49", the Bible, or "Real Housewives of Atlanta". All of those are situated in specific cultural settings and are important in their own rite. 

It is just up to the seer to figure out what they mean. 

Thanks for getting this far in the ramble and I look forward to your response! 

Cheers.