Page 23 - Literacy in the New Media Age

12 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

persists. There are, I am certain, stable truths about representation and
communication as persistent human and social processes. I try to focus on that
which is stable while insisting that the meanings and the potentials of that which
persists are nevertheless constantly altered by human semiotic work in changing
social and economic environments.
Some large questions are posed for considerations of literacy by all this. Such
as, what are the potentials of image as a resource for making meaning? Can
image do what writing does? Is it simply an alternative, perhaps a parallel mode?
Can image do things that writing cannot do? Or what is it that writing can do that
image cannot? If modes have distinct affordances then their potentials for
representing are partial. When we think of the affordances of modes in
communication, we can no longer think of writing, or indeed of ‘language’, either
as grand abstractions or as sufficient to all demands of representation and
communication. That is a revolutionary position. It forces us to think of
(alphabetic) writing in a deeply challenging way. And so the really large question
is, what is it that is distinctive about the resource of writing?
Always present is the issue of the media for the dissemination of meanings as
messages. The book has now been superseded by the screen in the role of
dominant medium of communication – using screen as a shorthand term for the
new communication and information technologies. At one level, the screen is
simply a surface, the site of the appearance of textual ensembles, the visible
display of the actions and effects wrought with the technology. The actual power
of the technologies lies in the fact that at one level all information is held in the
one code of binary numbers, and from that code information can be re-presented
in any mode, whether as music, colour, speech, writing or image. Hence the
realisation of meaning in the mode of writing is now just one possibility among
others: when meaning can as easily emerge in music as in writing, then the latter
has lost its privileged position. Writing becomes equal to all other modes in a
profound sense: the question then is the mundane and fundamental one about the
‘potentials’ of each mode in relation to specific tasks.
The vast social changes of the present, which move – in their different ways
and at differing pace – in the direction of abolishing, ameliorating and remaking
social hierarchies, are profoundly implicated in all this. The new technologies
have a vast role, but they do not determine social change. The often remarked
changes to the forms of writing in e-mail are a consequence of the unmaking of
the social frames of power at least as much as of technology. To use speech-like
forms in writing is a sign of ‘informality’, itself the sign of a lessening in social
‘distance’, a sign of the reduction in social power difference. It is a feature of the
technology of e-mail that it puts people in each other’s presence – not
geographical but temporal co-presence. ‘Presence’, seen semiotically, is just
that: not absence, and not distance. It is the social meaning of ‘not distant’ which
gives rise to ‘informality’, just as ‘being distant’, semiotically, gives rise to
formality. It is an affordance of the technology that gives rise to and can be used
for the expression of social factors, and so changes the form of signs in writing.