What is Literacy?

The traditional meaning of literacy is the ability to read and write. This simple definition of literacy is no longer reflective of the complex understanding required to engage with modern technology and social media. New literacy, for example, is the ability to discern that the email in the image below is sent by a robot with the intent to scam the receiver.

An obviously fake advertisement meant to phish the recipient's data.

    As for the writing aspect, an example of new media literacy is the ability to compose a blog post (which is what I'm doing right now). The most elegant prose in the world means nothing if it's illegable because of formatting errors and a bad font. Although the narrative I'm remediating is about my journey with the traditional meaning of literacy, I wouldn't be able to use this genre without basic knowledge of the mechanics of a blog website.