“when you ‘pull-off’ being a culturally specific sort of ‘everyday’ person, a ‘regular’ at the local bar...a teacher or a student of a certain sort, or any of a great many other ‘ways of being in the world’” (p. 7). Discourse Communities Furthermore, being able to function within a Discourse may carry advantages in different situations. For example, if a person is raised in a family of lawyers, the Discourses of politics or business may come very easily to that person. In the United States, those are all Discourses of power and they are closely related. Another person raised in a very different Discourse community might find himself or herself at a disadvantage when trying to move within the Discourse of business, trying to get a loan, for instance. One Discourse community is not inherently better than another; however, power within a society may be unequally represented within different Discourses. Situated Language In Gee's view, language is always used from a perspective and always occurs within a context. There is no 'neutral' use of language. Meaning is socially constructed within Discourse communities. Discourse Analysis Gee's 1999 text An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method is a foundational work in the field of discourse analysis. New Literacies According to Gee, there are at least two reasons why we should consider literacy in broader terms than the traditional conception of literacy as the ability to read and write. First, in our world today, language is by no means the only communication system available. Many types of visual images and symbols have specific significances, and so “visual literacies” and literacies of other modes, or the concept of multimodal literacy, are also included in Gee's conception of new literacies. Second, Gee proposes that reading and writing (the ‘meat’ of literacy according to the traditional notion of the term) are not such obvious ideas as they first appear. “After all,” he states, “we never just read or write; rather, we always read or write something in some way”. In other words, according to which type of text we read there are different ways in which we read depending on the “rules” of how to read such a text. Literacy to Gee, even if it is the traditional print-based literacy, should be conceived as being multiple, or comprising different literacies, since we need different types of literacies to read different kinds of texts in ways