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Literacy Autobiography
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Literacy Autobiography For those born in the United States of America, literacy is not so much a privilege as it is a simple fact of life. Being born into this society one is never totally unexposed to literacy, but is in fact pre-literate. Pre-literacy describes the time in a person’s life where they are submerged in a literate culture yet do not yet have the skills making them capable of interacting with and using this literacy. When you are born in a country like ours, you are exposed constantly to literacy mediums such as television, radio and books yet you are unable to interact with these. In 1985 I was born into a household that had two televisions and a radio making my growing experience a preliterate one. Such was not the case always, and as compared to the time writing was invented, being born preliterate is actually a relatively new concept. This is why I believe that the biggest factor in both my and many others change in pre-literacy and literacy is directly related to technology and the ways it has expanded our literate outreach as well as the speed in which word can travel. Technologies that spread literacy and the written word have expanded at an almost exponential rate in the last 100 years. Before that however, we can look at very distinct changes in the expanding of literacy. Some of these were discussed in class and played very vital roles. The first beyond the basic written word is the introduction of vowels to the written word. These letters allowed a certain string of letters that once could only mean one predetermined word to mean many more with the insertion of proper vowels. To think of a vowel as a technology may seem weird at first, but think back to the introduction of them to your vocabulary in elementary school. When I was a small child, I was taught the alphabet and that certain letters had special properties that when used properly could adjust the meaning or sound of a word. These letters were "A, E, I, O, and U (or occasionally W and Y)," and they were called the vowels. Once I could grasp the concept of these letters, and how they are implemented in words or sentences, your vocabulary expands at an almost uncountable rate. These five letters set the foundation for the grouping and structuring of a language rather than just having individual words. Much is the same for the first people to use vowels. Words that used to perhaps have many possible outcomes were now clarified, and a second party could read something without knowing beforehand what they were supposed to be reading. The second major technology that specifically helped me in the comprehension of reading and writing was the television. On one hand, it can be said that the television is a very oral phenomena, and to an extent in your pre-literacy days that could be considered possible. You really aren't aware before you're literate, and generally much later, that it takes a massive amount of literacy from many different parties in order to make a television network operate and deliver it to households. In my case, it was educational shows such as Sesame Street. Even to someone watching shows like this before they are fully capable of being literate, the exposure to literacy granted in these programs on a very global scale has a large impact. For instance, there was literacy in the 1800s, and early 1900s, but it was not nearly as global as it is today. Television and programs that teach children about literate culture and even the art and structure behind the spoken word have a large part in the advancement of them. On the surface level, it's obvious to see how a show like Sesame Street has had an effect on my literacy. A stuffed puppet teaching prose and rhetoric to three year olds is not the only thing the television has brought us in the advancement of literacy. Video in general can bring new exciting ways to learn into a classroom. As a young student, I enjoyed days in which instruction was given with some flashy 80's movie with star wipes and pictures and music, as opposed to always listening to an underappreciated and underpaid teacher. With the video, your attention is captivated by its use, and its message can become clearer. The video itself is a product of literacy, as it is the recording and reproduction of the spoken or written word. The last major technology I would like to cover that has played a large role on my personal learning of literacy is, obviously, the computer. In an age where computers are used for nearly everything it's hard to think back to a time without them. However, as caveman as it sounds, I was born into a household that did not have a desktop computer. It wasn't until about the tender age of four that I used my first PC. This is not to say that computers did not play a role, and for that matter a key one, in my pre-literacy to that point, but not quite in the way they would a few years later and today. I started "playing" with my first computer that was actually mine when I was about 11. It was an IBM 286 "Non-Upgradeable" Unit. It weighed about 75 pounds, was made of high quality solid steel construction, and was welded shut from all possible angles of entry. It did however give me the opportunity to type up homework and papers, which I learned at a very young as was an amazingly fast way to get things done. I'd procrastinate in doing my homework until the morning it was due, type it up in Notepad, save it to a floppy disk and run to the lab at school to print it out quickly before school started. It is hard to say if this entire process was more efficient than just doing my homework in a timely matter and turning it in, but it did get me prepared later classes and school work that required computers in order to be considered for credit at all. By the end of the 8th grade I was up to about 95 words per minute consistently without many corrections needed. It was because I've always had this interest in computers, the way they work, and what they can do that the transition into high school and college was almost a joke for me. People would groan that they had to type papers instead of hand writing them because literacy as they knew it was handwritten, while to me having the ability to put my thoughts onto paper electronically was like a dream come true. Computer literacy plays a key role in society as we know it today. Without being able to comprehend and filter the written word electronically, one may feel like they are illiterate in the modern computer driven age. My life in literacy has been primarily influenced by the learning of vowels at an early age, television, and computers. I feel like I had an advantage being taught how to use the vowels in our alphabet before I started school. Television also played a key role in learning our language. It was not always necessarily shows like Sesame Street, but any show helps in both the oral and literate sense. As a newscaster is speaking about a story, related text is on the screen that helps someone new to the language relate the spoken to the written word. Yes, I watched the news as a kid. Yes, that's rather nerdy. Computers and the internet were what I see as the last significant players in literacy in my upbringing. I feel there is a difference between being slightly literate, able to barely ready or write simple things, and being fully literate, which I feel I learned very quickly through the use of computers. While the three primary topics in my literary autobiography are specific for me, I think you'll find with a little research that basically anyone my age will see these as significant to them as well.