A basic understanding of literacy is pretty simple: can someone comprehend and complete a fairly simple task like reading? Literacy scholars, however, define literacy as more than just knowing the skill. Literacy is socially constructed and situated. Literacy means knowing and understanding the specific values, beliefs, and skills that make up socially constructed knowledge. Consider the idea of digital literacy and the idea of the digital native/digital immigrant. Many teachers (and society, in general) have the idea that because students today have grown up surrounded by technology, that because most of them live in homes with computers or own smart phones, that they are "digitally literate". Most are surprised to learn that students may not know how to compose an appropriate email, or as one online teacher friend succinctly put it "My students today can't google their way out of a paper bag." Digital literacy is more than just knowing how to turn a computer on. It's also knowing and understanding why we might choose to email someone over call them or how we might construct an email differently to a professor than to a friend. It's a question of understanding when texting is appropriate or when google is a perfectly adequate source.

Literacy is important for any number of reasons, though, I might argue that the most important element of being literate is the ability to function successfully in society. Being literate is more than the ability to read or to write. Being literate allows one to engage in society successfully. There's a reason that literacy has so many different modifiers - print literacy, financial literacy, digital literacy - and those are just a few.