literacy literacy literacy

Generally, literacy means the ability to read and write. However, in my opinion, literacy is not only about reading and writing, it is also about how people use their own knowledge and understanding of things like sports, movies and etc. to communicate with each others in order to survive in modern society. After I read Ong’s and Gee’s paper about how they think what literacy is, I have deeper understanding of how literacy functions in our daily life.
In Gee’s paper, he mentioned that literacy is uses of language in secondary discourses. By discourse, he means that 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. And what he is saying here is that literacy, as a tool of communication, functions in various areas such as family, school and workplace in our life. It is uses of language beyond those places, and it has wide range of applying specialized language. Walter J. Ong has different point of view toward literacy. In his paper, he defined literacy that “literacy is imperious. It tends to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought.” In his idea, literacy is associated in our daily life. In order to support his point, he gave an example of illiterates, and he pointed out that illiterates should learn literacy just like they can tie their shoes and drive a car.
From Gee’s and Ong’s opinions of literacy, I leaned that literacy is not just the uses of language in specific fields, it is something more than that, something that human being must have like eating and sleeping. Literacy can give us the whole picture from the culture and history to daily conversation between friends and family, it can help us to processing know information we received from outside environment. That’s why literacy necessary to our life.