Page 179 - Literacy in the New Media Age

10
SOME ITEMS FOR AN AGENDA OF
FURTHER THINKING

Requisite theories of meaning

The changes in representation and communication which are affecting alphabetic
writing have not run their course by any manner of means. The technological
changes, as much as the new economic and social conditions which are affecting
forms of representation, are still ongoing, at a pace and in directions which will
lead to further profound changes. In this respect the convergence of media is a
major factor. Multimedia messaging is already available. An article in a daily
newspaper – cut out for me by a colleague – mentions a Californian company
which is developing ‘multimodality’ in the form of programs that convert gesture
to writing, for instance. As a lesser instance, the possibility of direct voice-to-
machine interaction has existed for some time now, even though with
limitations. These are major forms of transduction which already exist – in the
latter case from a mode based on sound to a mode based on graphic substance.
All we can do at the moment is to look at what there already is, and extrapolate a
little; what appears looks very different from that which has been.
The major task is to imagine the characteristics of a theory which can account
for the processes of making meaning in the environments of multimodal
representation in multimediated communication, of cultural plurality and of
social and economic instability. Such a theory will represent a decisive move
away from the assumptions of mainstream theories of the last century about
meaning, language and learning. The major shifts concern a whole range of
hitherto taken-for-granted understandings, for instance about stable systems of
representation, about the stability (guaranteed by the force of convention) of rule-
systems, about the arbitrariness of the constitution of signs. In all these, a major
feature was the assumed centrality of language and, deriving from that, the
assumed foundation of ‘rationality’ in language. In these theories, language
‘users’ were marginal to the ‘system’ of language in the sense that their actions
had no significant effect on the system; users used the resources of the system,
they did not change it.