Page 19 - Literacy in the New Media Age

8 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

image-space suggests. The effects on writing, as is already ‘visible’ in any
number of ways, tiny at times, larger at others, will be inescapable.
That leaves the third objection. It cannot be dealt with quickly. It requires a
large project, much debate, and an uncommon generosity of view. On one level
the issue is one of gains and losses; on another level it will require from us a
different kind of reflection on what writing is, what forms of imagination it
fosters. It asks questions of a profounder kind, about human potentials, wishes,
desires – questions which go beyond immediate issues of utility for social or
economic needs. I attempt some answers at different points in the book.
What do I hope to achieve with this book? There is a clear difference between
this book and others dealing with the issues of literacy and new media. The
current fascination with the dazzle of the new media is conspicuous here by its
absence. I focus on just a few instances and descriptions of hypertextual
arrangements, internet texts, or the structure of websites. I am as interested in
understanding how the sentence developed in the social and technological
environments of England in the seventeenth century, as I am in seeing what
sentences are like now. The former like the latter – in showing principles of
human meaning-making – can give us ways of thinking about the likely
development of the sentence in the social and technological environments of our
present and of the immediate future. In that sense the book is out of the present
mould; in part it looks to the past as much as to the present to understand the
future. It is a book about literacy now, everywhere, in all its sites of appearances,
in the old and the new media – it is about literacy anywhere in this new media age.
So what can readers hope to get from the book? My sense is that what is
needed above all is some stocktaking, some reflection, a drawing of breath, and
the search for the beginnings of answers to questions such as: Where are we?
What have we got here? What remains of the old? What is common about the
making of representations and messages between then and now, and in the likely
tomorrow? I think that what we need are new tools for thinking with, new frames
in which to place things, in which to see the old and the new, and see them both
newly. That is what I hope the book will offer its readers: a conceptual
framework and tools for thinking about a field that is in a profound state of
transition.