Expanding the Concept of Literacy

W hen I ask people to define, in one or two sentences, the word literacy—what literacy is and what it enables people to do—the answers I receive are quite similar. To most people, literacy means the ability to read and write, to understand information, and to express ideas both concretely and abstractly. The unstated assumption is that “to read and write” means to read and write text. Although media and computer literacy are occasionally mentioned in these definitions, media literacy is most often defined as the ability to understand how television and film manipulate viewers, and computer literacy is generally defined as the skills to use a computer to perform various tasks, such as accessing the Web. If I also ask people about the nature of language, I usually receive the response that language enables us to conceptualize ideas, to abstract information, and to receive and share knowledge. The underlying assumption, so accepted that it is never stated, is that language means words. Twenty-five years ago, a rather popular book was entitled Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.1 Clearly, that vision of the world was not realized: television has not been eliminated, and screens—from television screens to computer screens—now dominate our lives. This reality needs to be acknowledged. So, in the spirit of the title of the earlier book, I’d like to suggest four arguments for an expanded definition of literacy: