Page 152 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 141

‘reading’ derived from alphabetic writing fit easily or at all with non-alphabetic
writing systems.
In fact in the contemporary situation the problem is sharper still. As the screen
becomes the dominant site of communication – even if (still) only in its social
and mythic impact rather than actually in quantitative terms – ‘reading’, as the
process of getting meaning from a textual entity, will need to deal with more than
just writing and image. A CD, or a web-page, may make use of music, of speech,
of moving image, of ‘soundtrack’, as well as of (still) image and of writing. All
these need to be ‘read’ together and made into one coherent text in ‘inner’
representation (as indeed they have to be when we watch a film).
In other words, the two meanings of ‘reading’ are always much more closely
aligned than we allow ourselves to think. ‘Reading the world’ through different
senses – sight, touch, hearing and even taste and smell – is always present in
‘reading’, even when we ostensibly focus on script alone. Why should it worry
us – for those of us who are worried – to include image in the scope of reading?
One answer might be that in Western alphabetic cultures, writing is seen
quintessentially as the transliteration of speech into storable, durable form
through the means of letters. Speech is seen as underlying writing. Of course, in
these cultures, an opposite view holds sway at the same time, namely that writing
is the ‘real’ form of language, the valued form, and the form which guarantees
meaning. At any rate, both views see a strong connection between speech and
writing, in which letters are the means of transliterating speech – ‘capturing
sound’ is a metaphor frequently used. ‘Reading’ is then the process of unlocking
both sound and meaning from letters: only letters (and the words and sentences
formed from them in complex ways) give access to meaning. Image, in this
view, does not contain meaning; or if it does it is not ‘read’ in the same way as
writing.
The view that writing is tied to sound is at best a partial truth. Members of the
communities of the speech-impaired can learn to read, even though they have
never heard the sound of language. In some alphabetic languages (Hebrew,
Arabic) only consonants are represented in writing; vowels are absent, or are
indicated by superscripts or subscripts only. And in pictographic forms of writing
it is in any case not sound which is (predominantly) represented in the symbols
of the script. Nevertheless, it is a view which is deep-seated and potent in
Western views of reading, and at times it forms the bedrock of common sense on
the issue – as much in approaches to the teaching of reading as in high theory
philosophy à la Derrida.
There is also the quite paradoxical fact that many of the claims and practices
which emanate from this position, as in rules for ‘spelling’ – that is, writing
words correctly – take writing as the starting point and reduce ‘reading’ to a set
of instructions for telling readers how to get from the letter to the sound. They
are rules for ‘sounding out writing’, and not for turning speech-sound into letter
sequences. That is, they provide rules for turning letter-sequences into sound-
sequences. An example I think of might be rules such as ‘the k in knight is