Literacy was once thought to be well understood and well defined. However, it has been argued that the digital world has disrupted previous notions of literacy, supplanting them with “new” forms of literacies—first in various new literacy studies and now in the library and information science (LIS) scholarship as it applies to information literacy (IL). But do the old forms of literacy in fact hold LIS back? Do the critiques of conceptions of literacy fully represent that foundational scholarship? Are the “new” literacies really all that different from traditional notions of literacy? A review both of concepts of literacy and IL that have been critiqued and of 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, together with an identifying of conceptual foundations of critical reflexivity that underwrite “new” literacies, is undertaken here to inform the scholarly assumptions and claims of LIS and IL.