Traciana Taylor

DaDa
UWRT 1101
To be literate means to have the ability to read and write. Social media has taken the world by
storm. Everyone has a Twitter ,Facebook, snapchat, or some type of social media. People use it
as an outlet to get all of their thoughts out. They tell you what they are eating at the moment,
what they are doing, who they are with, and everything else they can think of on the day to day
bases. I believe that the Internet has made it so that people are not going to be able to be as
literate as people in the past, such as Malcolm X. It stops your ability to be able to think on your
own and to also learn how to write correctly, being grammatically correct, and reading. To be
literate back then showed that you had wealth and you could afford education. People wished to
be able to do these things. It also meant that you were intelligent. Now that we have the Internet
we can look up words that we don't know or look up which word to use in a given sentence. I
had to learn what the difference between their,there, and they're is and now children do not even
know which one to use properly. Children also are so caught up into the Internet that they can't
spell for themselves. They don't like or know how to look up a word in the dictionary because
they can just look it up. Social media limits your characters or words that you can say and that
promotes using slang or abbreviations for sayings. This then gets to the point where children use
it in their writing. The problem is that they write like they speak now. The Internet can correct
sentences for people so they don't have to do it themselves anymore. To me not thinking for
yourself makes you more illiterate. But, social media does help spread the word about certain
subjects and/or incidents that are happening in the world today. If Malcom X had the Internet I

feel like he would be able to reach out to more people than he originally did. One person that he
knew could share whatever he said and then the cycle continues to go on and on, person to
person. I feel like it wouldn't have shaped the work that he has done he could have reached out to
different audiences. I feel as if it wouldn't have pushed him back and made him illiterate because
of his purpose for his writings. It would all depend if the Internet was as developed as it is today.
Many people are still literate in today's society even if we have Internet and social media. But,
the generations to come will be more attached to the Internet and not have physical text books or
worksheets which does save trees but to me it makes It harder to learn because you don't have the
physical paper in hand.