Page 24 - Literacy in the New Media Age

PREFACE 13

But it is the social conditions which enable that use in the first instance.
Nevertheless, we also have to remain aware that technology as tool has its
shaping effect. The possibilities of technical production effect the facility with
which we may use the various modes. Colour printing is still expensive; working
with images, even with the new technologies, has greater costs, both in terms of
computer storage and in terms of the user’s technical competence.
I think that at this time it is essential to look at quite basic, deep and also
extremely simple things. The book will have something to say about the stuff of
writing, its materiality, and its relation to the stuff of speech. This is a necessary
step at a time when there threatens a new separation of the human body and
technology. It will say something about image, and its relation to writing. It will
say something about work, because it is human work that shapes all that we
recognise as cultural, and which makes us human. The book will focus on how we
use these resources in our everyday making of meaning as messages. It will pay
attention to the context of the social, economic and political changes of the
present period and those of the near future. But it cannot do all these equally. So
the focus will, after all, be on writing in the present, with speculation just here
and there about its future.
I know that despite the grand canvas here, my interests are partial. They lie in
the materiality of the resources, and in how humans work with them in the
demands of their lives. I am interested in this matter of material, of stuff, and
how humans have worked with it and have worked it. I am aware that this partial
focus needs to be complemented – matched – with the interests and the work of
those who look much more and in great detail at practices. And the by now very
extensive work in the area of literacy practices (and literacy events) needs to be
complemented by work on the affordances and potentials of the stuff, the
material which is involved in the practices. In my view, practices can only be
understood when the potentials and limitations of the tools with which one
practises are understood. And the stuff is culturally remade precisely in those
practices. Theories are designed – like all tools – to do specific things. Extending
one theory too far, into a domain for which it was never meant, does no one a
service; I hope that I have observed well the limits of a semiotic, multimodal
approach to these questions.
This may sound as though my academic interests are as they are for reasons of
some objective notion of greater insight or better theory. So maybe I should say
that I think that ‘academic interests’ are never just that, blandly and abstractly.
Work is always meaningful, it is a ‘sign’ of who the person working is; and if it
is chosen work then even more so. My interest, and the form of my interest, in
speech and writing and the connections of these with culture and with power, is
such a sign. I came to a new culture and its forms of communication – not just of
‘language’, but of clothing, food, styles of housing, forms of leisure, gendered
being and gendered relations, all the vast and subtle meanings, the value system
to which we give the name ‘culture’ – at the age of sixteen, when I had already
learned them in another culture, with its ‘language’. Coming to that new society