Page 183 - Literacy in the New Media Age

172 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

with the (more or less) residual case-systems of Indo-European languages, which
tend to imply – even if weakly – that the subject-noun of a clause has
agentive force. This produces a potent disposition – never overtly expressed and
yet insistently conveyed with nearly every message. All this is then further
entrenched by narrative as the dominant genre of European (as of other) cultures.
If this produces dispositions through words and grammar, there are equally
strong dispositions produced through the very materiality of the voice. The tonal
and rhythmic features of the voice constitute a message-system of vast
complexity, attuning us in myriad ways to all kinds of aspects of our social,
cultural and affective interpersonal worlds. Culture shapes here as much as it
does in other ways – shaping dispositions towards pace, energy, modulation,
variability or stability.
There are yet further aspects: traditional forms of reading require the reader to
follow the set reading path and to fill the entities which are encountered with the
reader’s meaning. It is an activity which is inwardly directed, ‘inner-directed’.
The form of imaginative activity which it fosters is withdrawing, directed to inner
activity, contemplative. It is not action on the world, but action by the individual
on the individual in line with materials taken from the world. The new forms of
reading by contrast require action on the world: to impose the order of a reading
path on that which is to be read, arising out of my interests. Ordering a message
entity in the world in this manner is a different form of action – not
contemplative but actional, not inner-directed but directed outwardly. In the
traditional forms of reading, knowledge was set out by the writer in a
sequentially ordered fashion, and interpreted in that order by the individual for
her/himself in the act of reading. In the new forms of reading, knowledge is not
necessarily set out in such an ordered, sequential manner, but is frequently
shaped by the reader in the act of determining/constructing/imposing such order
by the new reader. This is a very different manner of engaging with the world. It
has many affinities with other aspects of the contemporary world, with its
demands for obtaining information and linking pieces of information
horizontally, with its turning away from ‘bodies of knowledge’ and towards
currently relevant information, and so on.
At this point the question arises yet again: is this problematic, and how is it
problematic? Can we envisage a world which is so reduced intellectually,
spiritually, emotionally, culturally, socially, politically, that all we can be
focused on is the instrumental, the pragmatic, the gathering of information,
unreflectingly? Will there be no need for reflective action, for introspection, for
reassessment and critique? Will understanding in its profounder sense not be
needed?
This is a question about imagined worlds, and about imagined human
dispositions. In any case it is already clear that the human social subjectivities
formed in such environments will differ from those formed in the stable world of
the former communicational givens.