Page 27 - Literacy in the New Media Age

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GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD

Into new contexts for writing

The world of communication is not standing still. The communicational world of
children now in school is both utterly unremarkable to them and yet it looks
entirely different to that which the school still imagines and for which it still,
hesitantly and ever more insecurely, attempts to prepare them. All of us already
inhabit that new world. Some of us still use the older forms of communication
and at the same time have become comfortable enough with many of the
possibilities of the newer forms of communicating on paper or on the screen – not
fully realising and yet at the same time uncomfortably aware of the profound
changes that are taking place around us. We no longer regard it as unusual that we
can change fonts in mid-text, that we can embolden the typeface or italicise it,
and all with next to no effort.
Of course such changes make only a small difference to the meaning of our
‘written’ texts. Layout, on the other hand, also very readily manipulated now,
does change the deeper meanings of the text. It matters whether I put my ideas
smoothly flowing along the lines of the page, or whether I present them to you as
bullet-points:

• The ‘force’ and
• the ‘feel’ of the text have changed. It has become
• more insistent,
• more urgent,
• more official. It is now about
• presenting information.

Layout is beginning to change textual structures; that much is clear. With such
changes – which may seem superficial – come others, which change not only the
deeper meanings of textual forms but also the structures of ideas, of conceptual
arrangements, and of the structures of our knowledge. Such seemingly
superficial changes are altering the very channels in which we think. Bullet