Literacy skills have always been important. In centuries past, people communicated via letters. These letters soon turned into telegraph messages. From there we advanced to the telephone, internet and then text messaging via a phone. Today's options for communication far outweigh the one or two of generations pasts. "Children learn these skills as part of their lives, like language, which they learn without realizing they are learning it." (N. Andersen, New Media and New Media Literacy: The Horizon Has Become the Landscape—New Media Are Here,; report produced by Cable in the Classroom, 2002, pp. 30–35) Students today learn in ways that their teachers could not even imagine decades ago when they were in school. Students learn technology just like they do the spoken language, by doing and today it is not uncommon for a 3 year old to have some basic knowledge regarding how to get on to the computer and load a game (hopefully educational). The way students learn and their abilities to showcase their learning has surpassed the years of book reports, posters, and shoe box representations. "We will not be able to achieve a liberating, collective intelligence until we can achieve a collective digital literacy, and we have now, more than ever, perhaps, the opportunity and the technologies to assist  us in the human project of shaping, creating, authoring and developing ourselves as the formers of our own culture. To this end, we must create the conditions for people to become wise in their own way."  (Poore, M. (2011). Digital Literacy: Human Flourishing and Collective Intelligence in a Knowledge Society. Australian Jouranal of Language and Literacy, 19 (2),20-26.)

Digital literacy is one component of being a digital citizen - a person who is responsible for how they utilize technology to interact with the world around them.Digital technology allows people to interact and communicate with family and friends on a regular basis due to the "busy constraints" of today's world.Not only do white-collar jobs require digital literacy in the use of media to present, record and analyze data, but so do blue-collar jobs who are looking for way to increase productivity and analyze market trends, along with increase job safety.

A decade ago, access to technology was limited and wiring schools was one of the nation's highest education priorities. Ten years of substantial investments have vastly improved this picture. According to the Secretary's Fourth Annual Report on Teacher Quality, virtually every school with access to computers has Internet access (99%), compared to only 35 percent of schools in 1994, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (Parsad & Jones, 2005). Public schools have also made consistent progress in expanding Internet access in instructional rooms, according to NCES. In 1994, 3 percent of public school instructional rooms had Internet access, compared with 93 percent in 2003. And between 1998 and 2003, the student-to-connected-computer ratio went from 12-to-1 to 4.4-to-1. Along with expanded access has come a growing pervasiveness of technology in society. For a generation of young people, technology, particularly the Internet, has assumed a substantial stake in their social and educational lives. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Hitlin & Rainie, 2005) found that roughly 21 million youth between the ages of 12 through 17—approximately 87 percent of the entire age bracket—use the Internet. Of those 21 million online teens, 78 percent (about 16 million students) say they use the Internet at school. This translates into 68 percent of all teenagers, up from 47 percent in 2000. The survey also found that most teens believe that the Internet helps them do better in school (86 percent of teens, 88 percent of online teens).

The best method the government can use to improve literacy rates in America is to advance the system of education and education technology. Of course advancing the education system isn't as simple as it sounds. Increasing the budget on education and education technology is a good start but without a proper plan then there is a possibility that the increased budget will only provide disappointing results. The first priority should be researching the effectiveness of schools when it comes to increasing literacy rates so that the government can find out if the teaching methods should be revised. There is also the possibility that some schools aren't accessible to the poor and that the government needs to provide financial support. This is the reason why thorough research is needed before advancing further into the plan. After adequate information is gathered, the Department of Education can devise a nationwide plan to enhance the education system.

People can also make good use of education and education technology to reduce the number of illiterates in America. The internet can be used as a great tool to promote learning since it has such a wide range. Almost everyone has access to the internet and if it is utilized properly, it can spread literacy advocacies like wildfire. This can be done quite easily by using the popularity of social networking websites to speed up the process of spreading information. If enough people are made aware of the literacy problems in America then it will make the task of improving literacy rates easily achievable.

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