Page 111 - Literacy in the New Media Age

100 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

This is precisely one of the central interests in texts of many people, whatever
their professional or non-professional involvement with text of any kind –
literary or televisual, popular or high cultural. The focus here concerns where we
look and what we are looking at. The previous focus on text, historically, and
one which is still that of common sense, was the interest more on what above I
called ‘the issues’, the discursive aspects of text. In this new focus that interest
remains, but now there is equal focus on how the social world is present in the
very structure of the text.
To state this once more: both the ‘Swimming Club Rules’ and the ‘Toyota
Law’ text focus on a prohibition on action. The most usual way to do this, in
most instances, is to use a negation: ‘no smoking’ (or ‘we thank you for not
smoking’); ‘please do not pick the flowers’ and so on. In the Swimming Club Rules
there are just three instances of negation: ‘no outside shoes will be worn’, ‘no
more than twenty-four bodies’, and perhaps the ‘embedded’ negative in
‘untrained children’ (children who are not (yet) trained). By contrast, in the
‘Toyota Law’ text (‘Toyota Law’ because Toyota land-cruisers are the vehicles
used as ambulances in this community), every one of the eleven rules uses a
direct negative, with the exception of rule 3. What does this mean? Does it mean,
simply, that there are more negations, and that there are more prohibitions to be
made in the case of ‘Toyota Law’? Hardly: every rule in the ‘Swimming Club’
text constitutes a prohibition, and has (or is) a (deeply) buried negation. ‘Parents
must accompany …’ is ‘parents must not leave children unsupervised’; ‘Being
absent for more than three consecutive sessions means expulsion’ is ‘do not miss
more than three consecutive sessions’. The verb ‘mean’ is used twice, tellingly:
if you are told the meaning of something, then this is not simply to enrich your
semantic repertoire (‘“Liebe” means “love”’), nor is it simply an instruction (‘if
you want to mean “Liebe”, then in English use “love”’); it is a prohibition (‘if
“Liebe” means “love”, then do not use “affection” in your translation’).
The texts project different social worlds; but that difference is not about more
or less prohibition, it is about how members of two distinct social groups are
socialised into prohibition and how prohibition is handled in these two worlds. One
says that you provide ‘meanings’, which are so entirely internalised by all
members of that group that no one will act outside of these meanings, and all of
us know that we can rely on that. Prohibition has become invisible. This is one
social implication of ‘shared meanings’. The other says that if you want things
done or not done, you say so, overtly; meanings are not internalised or at least
you cannot rely on the internalisation of meanings by all members of the group.
Prohibition is out there, for all to see. There are social implications both for the
presence and for the absence of ‘shared meanings’. The point is not to make value
judgements on these worlds; the real problems of each are easy enough to see. My
point is rather to show how generic organisation – realised in linguistic form –
provides another, a powerful, way of ‘reading’ the meanings of the social worlds
projected by these three texts.