Page 17 - Literacy in the New Media Age

6 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

The new technologies allow me to ‘write back’. In the era of the book, which
partly overlapped with the era of mass communication, the flow of
communication was largely in one direction. The new technologies have changed
unidirectionality into bidirectionality. E-mail provides a simple example: not
only can I write back, but the moment I hit the reply or forward button, I can
change the text that I have just received in many ways. If an attachment has
come with the e-mail I can in any case rewrite it and send it anywhere I wish. In
that process the power of the author, which has been such a concern in the era of
the dominance of the old technologies and of the mode of writing, is lessened
and diffused. Authorship is no longer rare. Of course the change to the power of
the author brings with it a consequent lessening in the author’s or the text’s
authority. The processes of selection which accompanied the bestowal of the role
of author brought authority. When that selection is no longer there, authority is
lost as well. The promise of greater democracy is accompanied by a levelling of
power; that which may have been desired by many may turn out to be worth less
than it seemed when it was unavailable.
Ready access to all texts constitutes another challenge to the former power of
texts. There was a certain fictionality in any case to the notion of the author as
the source of the text. Just as no one in a speech community has ‘their own
words’ – the frequent request in schools for putting something in ‘your own
words’ notwithstanding – so no one really ever originated their own texts. The
metaphor of text-as-texture was in that respect always accurate: our experience
of language cannot be, is never, other than the experience of texts. Our use of
language in the making of texts cannot be other than the quotation of fragments
of texts, previously encountered, in the making of new texts. The ease with
which texts can be brought into conjunction, and elements of texts reconstituted
as new texts, changes the notion of authorship. If it was a myth to see the author
as originator, it is now a myth that cannot any longer be sustained in this new
environment. Writing is becoming ‘assembling according to designs’ in ways
which are overt, and much more far-reaching, than they were previously. The
notion of writing as ‘productive’ or ‘creative’ is also changing. Fitness for
present purpose is replacing previous conceptions, such as text as the projection
of a world, the creation of a fictional world, a world of the imagination.
The dominance of the screen as the currently most potent medium – even if at
the moment that potency may still be more mythical than real – means that it is
these practices and these conceptions which hold sway, and not only on the
screen but also in all domains of communication. The affordances and the
organisations of the screen are coming to (re)shape the organisation of the page.
Contemporary pages are beginning to resemble, more and more, both the look
and the deeper sense of contemporary screens. Writing on the page is not
immune in any way from this move, even though the writing of the elite using
the older media will be more resistant to the move than writing elsewhere. It
is possible to see writing once again moving back in the direction of visuality,
whether as letter, or as ‘graphic block’ of writing, as an element of what are and