Lauren's Literacy Narrative

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.

     The final project of my Introduction to Academic Writing course is genre remediation, which means remixing a previous assignment into a new genre. Genre in layman's terms is merely a descriptive word that dictates the category of a film, book, or song. Before diving into my project, however, a more scholarly definition needs to be given. Kerry Dirk defines genre as "tools to help people get things done" ( Navigating Genres, pg 252). By this definition, genre gives the writer a response based on precedent to respond to a rhetorical situation.     The fun thing about genres is that there's a myriad of choices you can make in one that you can't in another. For example, it would be improper to include a meme on an academic essay. On a blog post, however?     BOOM. Meme.     This is an example of the constraints being different — essays require a formal tone, versus the causualness of a blog post. I point out a difference such as this because...