The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
March 11, 2008
LITERACY MEANS TXT MSGS 2!
I attended the Princeton Leaders in Literacy Celebration Party on March 4th in the Skills Centre and learned something.
As I spend most of my waking hours in front of or in the close proximity of a computer I guess I take a lot more for granted than I thought I did. A normal week for me includes getting up close and personal with anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words usually grouped in little packages known as sentences and paragraphs. So I suppose I've always considered myself somewhat literate.
And where I always thought literacy meant the basics the three R's: reading, writing and arithmetic, I discovered at last week's meeting that part of the Literacy Now program also includes the three C's cell phones, computers and cameras.
I wasn't sure what the 'cell phone' category was doing on that list until it was mentioned that text messaging is a very social, yet specialized form of communication.
It's also a form of communication I haven't quite figured out. My wife and I tried it for a while, but found communicating far easier when we used the cell phones as what else phones.
As for computers, well, I send my share and receive my share of e-mail but have always refused to use those nutty little smilies and can't bring myself to use more than one or two of the commonly used 'chat speak' terms. In actual fact, it was only last month I figured out that a program I was using was considered WYSIWYG (pronounced whizzy-whig) which meant it was dummy proof for a guy like me as the letters stood for What You See Is What You Get.
It made me question my own literacy level.
How could I miss such a simple term?
Then the following day I was in Keremeos chatting with an acquaintance when I brought up the literacy meeting and the three C's.
The person I was speaking with proceeded to explain that she'd been receiving e-mails lately signed with LOL.
She told me she was just a little alarmed as the person sending the messages was not what you would consider a close friend and when she was growing up, LOL meant Lots of Love.
Well, no wonder she was a little alarmed.
Suddenly I understood her concern and tried not to LOL at her mistaken LOL, although I did send her an e-mail once I got back to the office and signed it LOL - which I may continue to do just to tease her, but in a small way it also reminded me that there are many different levels of literacy in order to function properly in today's world.
Now you need to know how to read the words you spell, calculate what 2+2 equals, be able to TXT UR BFF, open, read, write and send e-mail along with taking pictures with a digital camera that'll edit them before you print or download.
And I thought writing 10,000 to 20,000 words a week was the easy part!
