What Does Literacy
Mean to Me?

For most of my life, I would have defined literacy fairly simply: the ability to read and write well.

Reading came easily to me from a young age. One of my earliest school memories is being separated into reading groups in first grade. I was already an advanced reader, and I remember becoming frustrated with our reading textbook because I was bored. As I got older, I became a voracious reader. I worked my way through the Sweet Valley Twins and The Baby-Sitters Club books, including every special edition I could find, at what probably seemed like an alarming rate.

Because reading was so central to my childhood, I think I developed a fairly traditional definition of literacy. In my mind, being highly literate meant being comfortable with books, words, and traditional written text.

Digital literacy did not really become part of my life until adulthood. I remember AOL chat rooms, AIM away messages, and eventually MySpace. Looking back, those spaces required their own kind of literacy. Choosing the right away message could communicate something without directly saying it. Your MySpace Top 8 could signal friendships, conflict, or social status without any explanation at all. We were learning to interpret new digital signals and social conventions at the same time the technology itself was developing.

Social media has complicated my understanding of literacy even further. Today, I think being literate also requires understanding how information reaches us. Algorithms increasingly determine what we see based on what we have already watched, clicked, liked, or searched for. That can make it incredibly easy to exist inside an echo chamber where our existing interests and beliefs are continually reinforced. Being able to read information is no longer enough. We also have to question why we are seeing it, who created it, and what may be missing.

This course is already challenging another assumption I have about literacy. When I first saw that The Baby-Sitters Club had been adapted into graphic novels, my immediate reaction was negative. I felt like books I loved had been reduced to pictures and fewer words. I associated that format with books for much younger children. However, Arola et al. (2014) describe texts as complete acts of communication that can combine linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and gestural modes. That makes me question whether I have been treating alphabetic text as inherently more sophisticated simply because it is the form of literacy I value most.

At this point, literacy means more to me than being able to read words on a page. It is the ability to interpret, question, and create meaning across different forms of communication. I am not sure yet how much my definition will change during this course, but that is exactly what I want this journal to document.