Information Literacy, “New” Literacies, and Literacy

Literacy was once thought to be well-understood and well-defined. However, it has been argued that the digital world has disrupted any notions of literacy, supplanted with “new” forms of literacies in various new literacy studies and now, in the library and information science (LIS) scholarship as they apply to information literacy (IL). But, do the old forms of literacy in fact hold LIS back, and, do the critiques of conceptions of literacy fully represent that foundational scholarship? Are the “new” literacies really that different from traditional notions of literacy? A review of: concepts of literacy and IL that have been critiqued; core ideas of foundational scholarship on the shift from orality to literacy that stand at the center of the scholarly debate over literacy in general; and identifying conceptual foundations of critical reflexivity which underwrite “new” literacies is undertaken to inform the scholarly assumptions and claims of LIS and IL