Page 115 - Literacy in the New Media Age

104 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

innovative, transformative, creative response by its maker to the environment as
she or he has perceived it.
Of course, in this we have at once also one feature of the new demands which
are made on ‘literacy’ in the widest sense. Text is more than content or form,
more than discourse or genre in my terms, but texts are also always more than
language. This card (as indeed the rules and regulations texts) is a response to
new demands, met out of a knowledge of what existing linguistic/semiotic
resources are available – from punctuation to syntax, from layout to genre, from
discourse to logo, from colour to prepositional usage, to thickness of card and
size – and how they can be (re)shaped in response to the requirements as
understood by the maker of this new text. This is a complex example of semiotic
design: an awareness of what is to be represented, for whom, using modal
resources available to serve the purposes of the designer. In this shift it becomes
apparent that text is more than genre, that text is always more than language. We
have moved from literacy as an enterprise founded on language to text-making
as a matter of design, an enterprise founded on a variety of forms of
representation and communication. From competence in use we have moved to
competence in design and, with that, innovation and creativity (through the use
of many modes) are now in the centre.
In this brief discussion I have tried to indicate that generic meanings are
carried as much in prepositional usage as in the thickness of the card and its
glossiness, as much as in the type of card as in the written text. All these point to
social meanings, realised in genre. They are not, however, all tied in any way to
temporality or to temporal sequence. The assumption that genre is a category tied
to temporality and sequence seems to be an instance of a mode-specific meaning
taken generally, an ‘accident’, we might say, of linguistic realisation.