Page 185 - Literacy in the New Media Age

174 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

‘Standards’ and their decline
At times I watch our son and his friends – and it is boys usually – playing around
and with their Playstation. The skills which they demonstrate – skills of visual
analysis, of manual dexterity, of strategic and tactical decision-making at meta-
levels – leave me entirely perplexed. It is not clear to me that these children are
victims of a general decline in mental abilities. All the games make use of the
visual, but they always make use of much more: there is a musical score, there is
rudimentary dialogue, and there is writing – usually as in comic strips, in a box
above the rest of the visually saturated screen. The speed at which the written text
comes and goes can be adjusted. The pace at which it is set by the players is
always too fast for me to read: I can never follow the text fully. Occasionally I
have attempted to test whether the players have read and followed the written text,
and have found each time that while they have, I have lagged behind. But in lagging
behind in reading, I have not, at the same time, been paying attention to the other
features of the screen and of the game, all moving at great speed, nor have I been
physically manipulating the controls.
It is in this context that I wonder what is meant by a ‘decline in standards’ as
far as reading ability is concerned. While I am not a fast reader, I do not count
myself as someone who has problems with reading either. Yet my reading speed
is not sufficient to take in the information from the written mode alone, never
mind the far greater amount of information that comes from the visual mode, or
of demands other than visual analysis, such as strategic decision-making, and the
use of the controls most of all. There are astonishing ranges of skill and ability at
issue here, which those who make assertions about standards seem not to have
taken cognisance of in any way. Clearly, the skills of reading which are at issue
here are not the skills of reading which the school still focuses on. However, they
strike me as much more aligned with what the young may need later in their
lives.
Again the question arises for me about what is demanded and produced here.
Certainly, the skills of near instant response are essential; though I am not clear
whether there is ever time for reflection, for assessment, for the quiet moment of
consideration and review. It is not programmed into the game. What dispositions
are imagined here, and prepared for the future, and where can an educational
agenda that would wish to encourage other aspects of human being-in-the-world
be developed?
These are the skills of the multimodal world of communication. They entail
differentiated attention to information that comes via different modes, an
assessment constantly of what is foregrounded now, assessment about where the
communicational load is falling, and where to attend to now. It is not the form of
reading which I was taught – sustained, concentrated attention over an extended
period, reading where the only attention went to the text which was being read.
By contrast, this is reading for specific purposes, for the information that I need
now at this moment. As I mentioned earlier, we may wish the young to learn my