Page 131 - Literacy in the New Media Age

120 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

combination. Translations, transformations and transductions will be entirely
normal, and made more so by the affordances of the new information and
communication technologies which make modal transformation and transduction,
as well as the co-appearance of modes, entirely normal.
Theories of meaning will have to be rethought and remade. There is a
reality to genre, but the conceptions from former social arrangements with their
(relative) stabilities have left us with both the wrong theory and the wrong
vocabulary. The wrong theory led us to believe that stability of language or of
text-form (as indeed of other social phenomena) is a feature of texts, when it had
always been – as it appears now – a feature of these phenomena in a particular
historical period, when relative social stability had obtained. So, for instance, to
speak of ‘generic mixes’ is really to conceive of genre in the older fashion – of
stable genres which can be and are mixed. A newer way of thinking may be that
within a general awareness of the range of genres, of their shapes and their
contexts, speakers and writers newly make the generic forms out of available
resources. This is a much more ‘generative’ notion of genre: not one where you
learn the shapes of existing kinds of text alone, in order to replicate them, but where
you learn the generative rules of the constitution of generic form within the
power structures of a society. And you learn what the shapes of these texts are,
coming out of those social conditions. That will permit (and account for) constant
change, and makes the actions of the producer of the genre innovative and
transformative. It encourages and normalises ‘design’ of text in response to the
perceived needs of the maker of the text in a given environment. In such a theory
all acts of representation are innovative, and creativity is the normal process of
representation for all.
There will need to be a new evaluation and description of the resources for
representation and communication, the means for making texts, which are
available and in use in a particular society. For in a plural society the generic
forms of all cultural groups will need to be brought into the market of
communication.
Literacy and communication curricula rethought in this fashion offer an
education in which creativity in different domains and at different levels of
representation is well understood, in which both creativity and difference are
seen as normal and as productive. The young who experienced that kind of
curriculum might feel at ease in a world of incessant change. A social theory of
genre is one essential element in bringing about that shift.