New literacy

Talking about new literacy is talking about the expansion of technology and the need we have to keep up to it. Literacy is a hard word to define, here the best definition I could find: Literacy. In few words literacy is the ability to read and write properly. So what is new literacy?  New literacy is being capable of understanding and using computers in an efficient way.

In this lecture Kate Williams analyzes eleven theses about the new literacy and in them several relations and perspectives of new literacy are offered. Here is a hyperlink for the original document in case, you my dear readers, feel like reading it: Document

Every thesis is superficially analyzed, but the main point are stated and explained.

After every short analysis several truths about the computer literacy are shown with short statements, almost all of this statements are pretty obvious but despite this are truths that we people who are fluent in this new literacy rarely notice this facts. For example, computer literacy is not only a matter of knowledge, but also of skills because you need to coordinate sight and touch to properly create a message and send it.  Another important point is related to the history of printing and it is expansion. When printing was created the first books to the be printed were bibles and  only a few were able to read them and share the words with other, as printing expand over Europe more and more people were able to read this first pages and eventually, this persons were person of the higher spots in society, high class, clergy and army, considering a privilege; something similar happened with computer literacy, at first only a few people were able to understand it, but as technology made possible that six of every ten homes in the United States have a computer with internet access (Williams 2003). A very important of this (as I consider) is that this computer literacy gives certain privileges to those who are fluent with it, gives certain advantage a sensation of superiority because one may feel more important, or smarter than someone who is not familiar with this literacy.  

But as with literacy being different for every person according to their studies, jobs and education, computer literacy is also different for every user. The example in the reading is that a lawyer or a physician won’t use the same applications or programs as an engineer, because each of them have a certain need to communicate and they will use applications, language and pictures to express themselves. And all of this is learned as a part of elemental education, in order to be fluent in this new literacy you must be able to get access to an education that gives the opportunity to be in touch with this since one is young. The longer the process of being in touch with this literacy, the more fluent one will be.

As technological improvements are released every day this computer literacy is constantly changing and we, as users, have keep up with changes updating our knowledge and ability to handle technology. With this is worth mentioning one important point of the theses analyzed in the text which mentions that this computer literacy is becoming part of our culture, but no the culture of a nation or an ethnical group, but for all the computer users in the world. For me this is critical. I recall a book of one of the most splendid writers in my country, Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1990. In his book, the labyrinth of solitude, he analyzes the Mexican culture, how has it evolve over the time and how today we Mexicans are a mixture of our past and present, a mixture of everything we have learned in our school years and trough religion, this process to create a cultural identity took more than three hundred years, and in less than forty years, since this computer literacy began to expand, it is creating a culture around it. If this computer literacy is achieving this in a short period time, who knows what will come next. The only thing we can do as students and future workers of digital media is watch closely the evolution and the impact of computer literacy. 

Williams, K. (2002). Literacy and Computer Literacy: Analyzing then NRC's Being Fluent with Information Technology . Retrieved from University of Michigan School of Information: http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/volume3/literacy.pdf