Page 12 - Literacy in the New Media Age

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THE FUTURES OF LITERACY
Modes, logics and affordances

It is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from a vast array of
social, technological and economic factors. Two distinct yet related factors
deserve to be particularly highlighted. These are, on the one hand, the broad
move from the now centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance
of the image and, on the other hand, the move from the dominance of the medium
of the book to the dominance of the medium of the screen. These two together
are producing a revolution in the uses and effects of literacy and of associated
means for representing and communicating at every level and in every domain.
Together they raise two questions: what is the likely future of literacy, and what
are the likely larger-level social and cultural effects of that change?
One might say the following with some confidence. Language-as-speech will
remain the major mode of communication; language-as-writing will increasingly
be displaced by image in many domains of public communication, though
writing will remain the preferred mode of the political and cultural elites. The
combined effects on writing of the dominance of the mode of image and of the
medium of the screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of
writing. This in turn will have profound effects on human, cognitive/affective,
cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on the forms and shapes of
knowledge. The world told is a different world to the world shown. The effects
of the move to the screen as the major medium of communication will produce
far-reaching shifts in relations of power, and not just in the sphere of
communication. Where significant changes to distribution of power threaten,
there will be fierce resistance by those who presently hold power, so that
predictions about the democratic potentials and effects of the new information
and communication technologies have to be seen in the light of inevitable
struggles over power yet to come. It is already clear that the effects of the two
changes taken together will have the widest imaginable political, economic,
social, cultural, conceptual/cognitive and epistemological consequences.
The two modes of writing and of image are each governed by distinct logics,
and have distinctly different affordances. The organisation of writing – still
leaning on the logics of speech – is governed by the logic of time, and by
the logic of sequence of its elements in time, in temporally governed arrangements.