Literacy in Communities

I am a part of a few communities that have rules for literacy. Some of the communities I am a part of are the cell phone community and Facebook. Each of the communities have both spoken and unspoken rules of literacy. Also, all of the communities have knowledge that is needed to become a part of the community.
The cell phone community is new to a few. By the cell phone community I mean all the people who text message as a way of communication. When a grandparent looks at a text message that some of us send, to them it may almost look like a code. Text messaging with the abbreviations and unspoken rules make picking up on it take some time and work. One of the unspoken rules is the use of capitalization as a form of communicating stress on anger or importance. I thought text was fairly logical in the abbreviations and rules so it was easy for me to pick up on, but for my mom it was a little different. My mom took a while to understand some of the abbreviations and rules when it came to text. For example, she didn’t get why people texted people in the first place. For the most part the reason people text is an unspoken rule that the person sending the text either can’t talk or doesn’t want to. Learning the rules in the texting community takes time, experience and guidance for a veteran.
Another major, newly developed literacy community is Facebook. Facebook takes into understanding many different parts of literacy. First, just like texting you would need to understand the abbreviations. Next, the one that is hardest to understand is the local slang and history. A lot of the communication done through Facebook is hard to understand, because it is taken out of context. Most of the conversations relate to events that are coming up or happened the night before. So, it’s hard to understand a conversation when you are only getting half of it. Some of the rules in the facebook community are: don’t take anything too seriously, understand the local twist on the English language, and all the communication is done in an informal way. The facebook community and its literacy can be learned by experience.
Throughout the world there are a ton of little communities of literacy and literacy rules in their communities. Each community has their own twist on their countries language and rules with literacy. The bottom line is literacy is just an understanding of the way people communicate and takes into consideration rules, culture and audience.