The 8th post

As the title, Literacy in Three Metaphors, Sylvia Scribner uses three metaphors to define and describe what literacy is and how important it is. They are literacy as Literacy as adaption, literacy as power and literacy as a state of grace. At premier time, maybe also the most basic function of it, literacy is what we need to adapt the society.  We need the skill to survive. We need it to learn things, to do jobs, to operate our lives. The second one is that literacy makes us powerful. It can help me to develop our countries. For most of the world, compulsory education is a primary nation policy. If people are illiteracy, it always means that they can’t have advanced technology and culture. The third, of course, we always educated person is great and grace. Hedges has a similar theory with Scribner; he thinks literacy is important for a citizen, only with that he can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. But he also believes literacy is not the only thing we need to develop our life, to improve our economic situation, he use an experiment to explain it. Thompson and Carr both write something about how the modern technologies today change our reading and writing habits. They have entirely opposed opinions. Carr shows his worried about the change. He thinks Internet makes us lose the ability to read and think deeply. People just want to do some short readings; they become never want to pay much time on it. On the contrary, Thompson thinks Internet makes us situation better than before. Because of the Internet, people write much more in than last generation. It helps people improve their writing ability, and provide a platform on which people can show his works. Beside, people will never worried about the writing style can ruin our ability of serious academic writing, people can distinguish it easily. But in my opinion, I think we really need to concern about the loss our culture today. Today, more and more people use network language. For example, in China, there are many new words be created on the Internet, them appears on the Internet, magazines, TV, and any other media product. You can hear a same again and again in one day. People’ vocabulary seems become smaller and many old but beautiful words will never be used today. So I think it is a problem for us, we can create new culture, but we should also try to keep the good part of our traditional culture.