Page 107 - Literacy in the New Media Age

96 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

To start with, we note that these rules are not numbered. Here too the sequence
of rules has the meaning of foregrounding those issues which seem to have
proved most worrysome to the rule-makers in their weary experience – too many
people cramming into their flats, blocked toilets, uncollected rotting garbage, and
so on. It seems that fish-scales on the concrete near the back door are more
problematic than heaters left on for hours. Here the rule-makers, or the authority
from which the rules issue, are named at the end of the text, though as in the
previous set they are not named in the rules themselves: not ‘we ask you to place
your garbage out on the concrete’. With one exception, those for whom the rules
are intended are not directly addressed: not ‘you are kindly requested not to use
newspaper in the toilets’; the exception being the fourth rule. So, as with the
previous set, the participants are not or are hardly named. The relations between
the proprietors/rule-makers and the addressees of the rules are represented as
distanced, via three mechanisms: the avoidance of terms of address – with the
exception of ‘persons’ and ‘your’; the use of agentless passives – ‘no fish to be
cleaned’; and the pervasive use of negation – only, no, not.
There are therefore clear similarities and clear differences between the sets of
rules – similarities both at the level of strategies, such as distancing, and of
actual realisations, such as the agentless passives, third person address,
avoidance of naming. The similarities guarantee the recognisability of the genre
– no one would mistake it as a genre of a different kind – and the differences are
evidence of the constant shifts in form in response to variabilities in the social
relations.
It might be of interest to pick on just one of the differences, in order to explore
the very close link between social relations and linguistic realisation. The second
set of rules has five overt negatives, counting only as one of these (only five = not
more than five); although there are also several covert negatives vacate (not
stay), turn off (not leave on), unoccupied (not occupy). In the much longer
Swimming Club text there are only two overt negations, though there are several
covert ones as well. The social situation of the one genre is such that the rule-
makers can assume that prohibitions are, by and large, internalised to such an
extent that either they need not to be stated, or they can be left as covert
negatives. This is a social group that accepts that ‘X means Y’ means ‘X cannot
mean other than Y’. It is a group that has agreed to internalise prohibition as tacit
consent. That can seemingly not be the basis for action of the proprietors of the
holiday flats. Their clientele is not socially unified enough to permit such an
assumption. They can assume that their guests will not light a fire on the living-
room floor, but they cannot assume a range of other things; they are not
addressing a social group which is unified in that respect.
This is more apparent still in the third example. It comes from an Aboriginal
community in Northern Australia; Wollondilly, the name of the community, is
fictional.

Toyota Law