Page 21 - Literacy in the New Media Age

10 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

the relation of image to writing which we still know as ‘illustration’. When
writing now appears on the screen, it does so subject to the logic of the image.
The chain of this effect runs further. The screen and its logic more and more
now provide the logic for the page also. As one element in the communicational
landscape which is dominated by the logic of the organisation of the visual modes,
writing is coming to experience the effects of visualisation once again. The
effect is that alphabetic writing is undergoing changes in its uses and in its forms
as significant as any that it has experienced in the three or four thousand years of
its history. All this is taking place in a larger environment in which the social and
political frames which up to now had supported writing as the dominant mode of
representation – and the book as its natural and dominant medium – are
weakening or have already disappeared.
This does not ‘spell’ the end of alphabetic writing. Writing is too useful and
valuable a mode of representation and communication – never mind the
enormous weight of cultural investment in this technology. But it is now
impossible to discuss alphabetic writing with any seriousness without full
recognition of this changed frame. My use of ‘alphabetic’ in front of ‘writing’ is
one consequence of this shift. The pressing use of image is forcing a
reassessment of what writing is, what it does and does not do, and what it can
and cannot do; it forces an insistence on its very materiality – the physicality, the
materiality of the stuff that is involved. This in turn forces us to attend to the
sensory channels that are drawn in. Once we attend to this, it becomes clear that
there is a deep difference in the potentials of image and writing, with the latter –
as alphabetic writing – still retaining its strong relation to sound and its
potentials, and the former with its use of light, space and vision and their
potentials. In this context ‘writing’ becomes newly problematic. Writing which
is tied still to sound via the alphabet is different to writing which is not linked to
sound, as in those writing systems which use ‘characters’ and are oriented much
more to representing concepts through conventionalised images, rather than
through sounds transcribed imperfectly in letters.
All this has led me to adopt a somewhat unusual approach for this book on
‘literacy’. I try to take account of four factors: the social – in the weakening or
disappearance of relevant social ‘framings’; the economic – in the changing
communicational demands of the economies of knowledge and information; the
communicational – in the new uses and arrangements of modes of
representation; and the technological – in the shape of the facilities of the new
media. Just to hint at examples, for the first I would point to changes in relations
of (social) power which are changing levels of ‘formality’ in all aspects of
writing. In relation to the second, there are above all the profound questions
about the adequacy of writing to an information-based economy, and then the
greater specialisations in the tasks of writing that flow from this. The third is
demonstrated by the increasing use of image as a means of communication;
while the fourth is best illustrated by the changing relations of the media of the
page – the ‘print-media’, book, magazine, newspaper – and the screen.