ABSTRACT
Literacy is as powerful a sorting mechanism as it is a technology; it is the very means by which public knowledge may be instantiated in the modern world. In a putatively free market economy, public knowledge is useful insofar as it accords with the needs and aims of private profit; the way to control knowledge is to regulate access by co-opting the context. Understanding of literacy becomes central to the discussion of public knowledge and democracy because the ability to read represents the ability to make sense of all kinds of events and circumstances. Legality demands written records; written records demand to be read; the link between economic and social decision making is literacy-the language of profit. Literacy by itself has no intrinsic value; it is a tool by which cultural forms may be encoded and/or decoded. But literacy, as a technology embedded in the complex process of cultural production, becomes heavily value laden, just as the process itself does.
