Page 151 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

LOCALISATION

access (priesthoods and economic or administrative officials) and what
it was used for (sacred and state business).
Modern societies are heavily committed to ‘universal’ literacy, and
use it as an autonomous means of communication quite different from
that of speech. This has led many observers to seek to account for the
peculiarities of modern culture by reference to ‘literate consciousness’.
First among such critics was Marshall McLuhan (1962). More recently,
literacy has become the focus of important debates about the
ideological function of education since, it is argued, literacy is a
vehicle for the dissemination of both values and practices (as well as
skills) that may be effective in reproducing hegemonic order.
Without having to claim that writing ‘caused’ the forms of
consciousness and through them the social organisation of twentieth-
century society, it is still possible to study the extent to which literacy
is more than just an innocent skill. It is ideologically and politically
charged – it can be used as a means of social control or regulation, but
also as a progressive weapon in the struggle for emancipation. Above
all, however, a literate workforce is a pre-condition for industrialised
production, and the reproduction of a literate workforce requires
large-scale state intervention to disseminate the appropriate type,
content and level of literacy for this purpose.
Literacy has come to be associated with alphabetic writing, and is
commonly not applied to the decipherment of audio-visual media
such as television. One reason for this is that throughout the broadcast
era ‘media literacy’ was confined for most people to the ability to read
only. You could watch television, but it was much harder to ‘write’
with it. Now new media technologies have brought down the prices
of digital cameras to that of a good pen, and computer software
enables newpossibilities for editing and exhibition It is not too far-
fetched to say that, as in the Renaissance period when written literacy
began to proliferate, the gap between those who can read only and
those who can both read and write is closing. Media literacy as a
widely dispersed mode of two-way communication is at hand.
See also: Orality

LOCALISATION

Exploitation of the geographical niche. Globalisation has altered the
movement of economic and cultural forces so that they are nowless
limited by geographic space and are more evasive of nation-state

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