What is Literacy, how is it working and how do I see literacy as important socially?

What is Literacy, how is it working and how do I see literacy as important socially?
James Paul Gee, a linguist, define Literacy as control of the “uses of language in secondary discourses.” And by a discourse he mean “a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or a social network.” We can think as a discourse as an “identity set” or an “identify package” of how is causes us to think, communicate and act. Every discourse has their own ideology with its own unique norms, views and values. Secondary discourses are associated with the discourse you meet in your secondary institutions, which is institutions beyond family or people you interact closely with every day, such as school or work. Literacy is the use of language, written or oral, beyond your everyday-language that you use in conversations with your family.

Walter J. Ong has another way to put it “Literacy is imperious. It tends to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought.”

Ong and Gee agree on is how Literacy work. Gee says that you can control or master a discourse mostly with acquisition, not learning, “Acquisition is a process of acquiring something subconsciously by exposure to models and a process of trial and error, without a process of formal teaching. Teaching on the other hand is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching.” Ong is explaining: “Illiterates should learn writing as they learned to tie their shoe-laces or to drive a car.” And we all know that the best way to master this is to being exposed to it over and over again.

I see Literacy as important socially in that way that it is a part of being a human being, particularly for those who uses a written language. According to Ong: “the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form.” What he is mainly saying here is that the part of the population that is able to write has the opportunity to think more complex, than those who live in a oral worlds. The better you master the language they use in the specific culture or group, the more literate you are. Another argument Gee makes about why literacy is important in social life is that: if you are exposed to a special language early in life it will help you off later in your education.

Literacy is not simply the ability to read and write, it is something beyond this. It is competence or knowledge in a specialized/specified area or how well you are able to converse with people outside your family.