Are We Illiterate Essay -- Essays Papers

Are We Illite outrankLiteracy throughout history has been delineate and redefined nearly as rapidly as new generations emerge. As we travel into the twenty first century, our generation moves to redefine literacy once again. However, unlike generations past, we ar taking literacy and rapidly spanning it over new mediums that had been, until recently, unavailable. Advances in technology at heart the past twenty years have been so immense that the valet race has literally packed up centuries of research, data, history and other entropy and moved it into the digital world, spawning a new necessity to have a general working knowledge of computing technologies. Mainstream society as a whole has concluded and accepted that in the twenty first century theatrical role of computers and exercise software go out dictate most aspects of cursory sprightliness, therefore all but requiring the citizen of the new millennium to be literate in at least the most basic of computing technolog ies.In its earliest forms literacy was purely the processes of interpreting symbols or hieroglyphics. Many antediluvian writings have been recovered and interpreted, undisputedly proving that literacy has, in some form, ever so existed. As time passed new forms of language and literature surfaced and literacy became known as the dexterity to read and write.1 Or, more specifically, ones ability to convey ones thoughts onto a medium understood by others. At first these mediums took the form of nearly anything mankind has used anything from rocks to canvas. Eventually, with inventions such as the printing press, the mediums used by people became standardized and the description of literacy was in no need of revision.With the onslaught of technology brought on by the twentieth century, society began to accept new mediums over which to express themselves. Multimedia, the use of several different forms of media, has been becoming commonplace in everyday life since the advent of the i nternet, a world-wide conglomeration of computers networked together via telephone lines, optical wires, and planet connections (among other forms of digital communication). Content of seemingly boundless quantities is available in nearly every household in the US thanks to the questionable Information Super Highway. To capitalize on such a reclaimable resource requires that people of all ages be able to knowingly enlist the appli... ...be productive to be literate, as a person who understands the use of an application used for browsing the internet may also be literate while remaining completely unproductive.Furthermore, if one was to separate, in a fittingly binary manor, the computer literate from the unknowing, who is to say which group is better eat up? Obviously being computer literate in the early twenty first century is non completely necessary, however, if ratios of computer literate to uninformed increase at so much as half the rate they have in the past twenty ye ars it will not take long before society has firmly and implicitly declared that being computer literate is a necessity of everyday life. will we ever see a time when those who are computer illiterate will be looked upon by the literate as ignorant, just as those who can not read are looked upon today? Perhaps it will be a generation not far in the approaching that decides that literate is ready to be redefined.BibliographyWebsters II New riverside Dictionary, (c)1978 Houghton Mifflin Co.Ask.com, (c) 1995-2000 CNET Networks, Inc. College of Education, University of Houston http//www.coe.uh.edu/insite/elec_pub/html1995/092.htm