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An interesting post. Communication certainly seems to be the key theme here. I wonder if it’s a matter of category.

Suppose we came across a human civilisation, hitherto unknown. No one, except them, would be able to understand their language. No one, except them, would be able to understand their symbolisms – call it writing. Would we deem them to be literate or not?

It would be pompously presumptive to call them illiterate, though we would have no idea the depth and breadth of their own communications (language, writing) until we understood something of it. I’m assuming that there would be some commonality (ideas, objects, emotions, behaviours) that would permit some points of contact to be made so that communication experts could start some strategy of interpretation (I’m using the term communication experts in a broad sense here).

But supposing the civilisation was not of the human kind. Arthur C Clarke is purported to have believed there would be less than 1% commonality between human civilization and any so-called alien civilization in their connected understandings of ideas, objects, emotions, behaviours etc. He felt that the severe lack of this would be one of the biggest barriers to making any headway at all in interactive communication. Despite any obvious intelligence, language, and ability to communicate with themselves, Clarke asserted that communication between them and us would be almost impossible.

Today we debate about the drifting of language, pour scorn on new words and new spellings of old words, and in particular, pour scorn on the use of text language when it comes to assessing literacy. The recent debate on this clearly showed the inability of examiners to understand otherwise literate students.

I believe that literacy is how we define it on the continuum of ability to communicate. This can be either in speech or in writing, by whatever means an individual uses to perform these. But we can only do this to any useful degree if there is commonality between the parties. That commonality between humans who speak and write in a particular language is essential before we can make any reasonable judgement about literacy.

Given that soon there may well be a diverse range of platforms from which literacy can be defined, we may well have to embrace a new paradigm when it comes to understanding what ‘literacy’ is about. The ability to adapt and learn new language skills, and the proficiency of this, could well be what is seen as literacy in the future. The literate person could well be deemed one who has the ability to adapt and learn new literacy skills rather than just one who has an assessable proficiency in literacy at any particular level.

Ka kite
from Middle-earth

In regard to visual literacy, I see that playing an ever increasing role. I would extend that to multi-media literacy as we try to communicate more in less space and time. Using the combined power of specific media is a form of “literacy” and perhaps the highest. Telling a story in a few words, with a limited number of images and sounds which convey information beyond background music require real skill.

I look forward to further dialog on “literacy” and hope to improve my own.

Bud