Page 186 - Literacy in the New Media Age

AN AGENDA FOR FURTHER THINKING 175

form of reading also; I am certain that it has benefits and rewards, and that it is
and will remain essential at times. But such a form of reading now needs to be
taught as a specialised task, not as the form of reading that defines what reading
is. In my view, the objection of young (and especially male) readers to the
school’s agenda stems from there.
So there is a large and very difficult agenda, to begin to unpick what reading
has been, what it has been for, what it can and must be, and what of the past
practices of reading ought to be brought forward into the future. This is not,
in my view, a project governed by nostalgias, but a project which is entirely hard-
headed and clear-sighted. It asks about the human dispositions which we may
wish and need to foster in order to remain able to act fully in response to all the
demands that humans will continue to meet. As curricular agenda it demands
that we engage with the young on the grounds of their experience, and at the same
time show them with greater confidence than is usually the case now why in such
an agenda reflection is essential for them. What is its utility for them, in their
lives even now?
I have spoken of different demands, different forms of imagination. It seems
clear to me that the demands made of the new generation are greater in all respects,
but above all they will be and already are different. And what appear as playful
diversions rapidly become central demands. The young are teaching themselves
because the old cannot or will not. Take ‘texting’ as an example. The keyboard
of the mobile phone is configured entirely unlike the keyboard of the old
typewriter which persists to this moment as the keyboard on my laptop
computer. This keyboard is based on the use of the alphabet in a specific
language, English – in German it is configured slightly differently to take account
of its frequency of letter use and the salience of certain letters. But in each
language so far the alphabet as a transcriptional system dominates. In text-
messaging the alphabet is reconfigured in line with different demands: not as a
transcriptional system, but as a system of information: pressing five times on the
key marked 6, in the mode ‘write messages’, produces the letter ö. Letters co-
occur in groups of three or four, so that in one sense the alphabet has been
reduced to eight ‘letters’ – eight information entities, among which of course
differentiations can be and are made. These arrangements can be adjusted, and
they are in a moment of transition, both in individual use and in the facilities
provided. Those with older forms of socialisation would want to keep the
alphabetic arrangement. The younger generations are adapting the affordances to
a new and complex kind of iconic writing.
It is not hard to see how puns or abbreviations – playfulness again – will
transform the potentials of sign-making: no longer ruled by the alphabet’s
relation to the sound-system of the language, but by a new relation in which the
currently developing affordances of this new mode make possible new signs and
sign-combinations – new possibilities of meaning. This will become even more
the case as images make their way into this developing mode.