Page 20 - Literacy in the New Media Age

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PREFACE

This book is about alphabetic writing. It appears, however, at a moment in the
long history of writing when four momentous changes are taking place
simultaneously: social, economic, communicational and technological change.
The combined effects of these are so profound that it is justifiable to speak of a
revolution in the landscape of communication; this revolution is producing far-
reaching effects in the uses, functions, forms and valuations of alphabetic writing.
Social changes are unmaking the structures and frames which had given a
relative stability to forms of writing over the last two hundred years or so.
Economic changes are altering the uses and purposes of the technology of
writing. Communicational change is altering the relations of the means by which
we represent our meanings, bringing image into the centre of communication
more insistently than it has been for several hundred years, and thereby
challenging the dominance of writing. Lastly, technological change is altering
the role and significance of the major media of dissemination. The screen is
beginning to take the place of the book, and this is unmaking the hitherto
‘natural’ relation between the mode of writing and the medium of the book and
the page.
After a long period of the dominance of the book as the central medium of
communication, the screen has now taken that place. This is leading to more than
a mere displacement of writing. It is leading to an inversion in semiotic power.
The book and the page were the site of writing. The screen is the site of the
image – it is the contemporary canvas. The book and the page were ordered by
the logic of writing; the screen is ordered by the logic of image. A new
constellation of communicational resources (from now on I shall speak of them
as semiotic resources, that is, resources of and for making meaning) is taking
shape. The former constellation of medium of book and mode of writing is giving
way, and in many domains has already given way, to the new constellation of
medium of screen and mode of image. The logic of image now dominates the sites
and the conditions of appearance of all ‘displayed’ communication, that is, of all
graphic communication that takes place via spatial display and through the sense
of sight. That now includes writing, which is becoming display-oriented. When
in the past image appeared on the page it did so subject to the logic of writing,