Page 105 - Literacy in the New Media Age

94 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

2 Being absent for more than three consecutive sessions without
explanation to the membership secretary means automatic expulsion.
3 No outside shoes will be worn when in the pool area.
4 Please respect the facilities and equipment, and take particular care
with untrained children.
5 The age limits of the club are six months to eight years. For the six to
eight years old instruction will be provided. Children may remain
members for the completed term in which their eighth birthday falls.
6 There must be no more than twenty-four bodies in the pool at any one
time.
7 Membership cards must always be carried and shown on request.
(Norwich, England, 1974)

To start with, we can note that the rules are numbered. While the sequence of
rules seems to have some meaning – for instance, the rule-makers seem to have
been concerned to foreground ‘parental responsibility’ – the ordering seems
more to be about how many rules there are than about a strict sequence in which
the rules are to apply, and more about showing that there is ‘an order’ than about
some principle of ordering. Rule 7 for instance might appear as rule 2 and so on
without any great disturbance to the meaning of the text. The idea of ‘staged
process’ is very weakly present.
The rule-makers, or the authority from which the rules issue, are not named,
and with one exception those to whom the rules are addressed are not directly
addressed; the exception being rule 4. That is, the participants are in fact not or
hardly named or identified; they are assumed to ‘know who they are’. The social
relations between them are represented as distanced, via three mechanisms: the
use of third person terms of address: ‘parents’ (rather than ‘you’); the use of
agentless passives – ‘cards must be carried’ (rather than ‘please always carry
your card’); and the quite pronounced use of nominalisations – ‘an instructed
class’, ‘being absent for more than three consecutive days without explanation to
the membership secretary’, ‘untrained children’ (rather than the form with the
verb: ‘children who are not yet (toilet-)trained’). The first makes the people
involved talked about rather than talked to; the second deletes mention of those
who are responsible for actions; and the last shifts focus from actions in time, to
states of affairs or object-like phenomena out of time.
A rule is both a command and an instruction indicating how action is to be
performed. In these ‘rules’ commands are represented either as ‘meanings’ –
‘being absent means expulsion’ – or as classifications – ‘the age limits are six
months to eight years’. That is, interpersonal relations are re-presented either as a
meaning relation or as a relation of classification, that is, as ideational relations:
‘being absent … means automatic expulsion’, ‘in most cases this will mean one
adult enrolling’, ‘no outside shoes will be worn’, ‘the age limits are six months to
eight years’, ‘there must be no more than twenty-four bodies in the pool’.