Page 18 - Literacy in the New Media Age

THE FUTURES OF LITERACY 7

will be fundamentally visual entities, organised and structured through the logics
of the visual. It is possible to see writing becoming subordinated to the logic of
the visual in many or all of its uses.

Right now, an objection
It may be as well to try and answer here and now three objections that will be
made. One is that more books are published now than ever before; the second is,
that there is more writing than ever before, including writing on the screen. The
third, the most serious, takes the form of a question: what do we lose if many of
the forms of writing that we know disappear?
To the first objection I say: the books that are published now are in very many
cases books which are already influenced by the new logic of the screen, and in
many cases they are not ‘books’ as that word would have been understood thirty
or forty years ago. I am thinking here particularly of textbooks, which then were
expositions of coherent ‘bodies of knowledge’ presented in the mode of writing.
The move from chapter to chapter was a stately and orderly progression through
the unfolding matter of the book. The contemporary textbook – since the late
1970s for lower years of secondary school and by now for all the years of
secondary school – is often a collection of ‘worksheets’, organised around the
issues of the curriculum, and put between more or less solid covers. This is still
called a book. But there are no chapters, there is none of that sense of a reader
engaging with and absorbing a coherent exposition of a body of knowledge,
authoritatively presented. Instead there is a sense that the issue now is to involve
students in action around topics, of learning by doing. Above all, the matter is
presented through image more than through writing – and writing and image are
given different representational and communicational functions.
These are still called ‘book’, though I think we need to be wary of being
fooled by the seeming stability of the word. These are not books that can be
‘read’, for instance, in anything like that older sense of the word ‘read’. These
are books for working with, for acting on. So yes, there are more ‘books’ published
now than ever before, but in many cases the ‘books’ of now are not the ‘books’ of
then. And I am not just thinking of factual, information books but of books of all
kinds.
And yes, there is more writing than ever before. Let me make two points. The
first is, who is writing more? Who is filling the pages of websites with writing?
Is it the young? Or is it those who grew up in the era when writing was clearly
the dominant mode? The second point goes to the question of the future of
writing. Image has coexisted with writing, as of course has speech. In the era of
the dominance of writing, when the logic of writing organised the page, image
appeared on the page subject to the logic of writing. In simple terms, it fitted in
how, where and when the logic of the written text and of the page suggested. In
the era of the dominance of the screen, writing appears on the screen subject to
the logic of the image. Writing fits in how, where and when the logic of the