Page 28 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 17

points are, as their name suggests, bullets of information. They are ‘fired’ at
us, abrupt and challenging, not meant to be continuous and coherent, not inviting
reflection and consideration, not insinuating themselves into our thinking. They
are hard and direct, and not to be argued with.
The more profound changes have come, over the last two decades or so, from
a number of distinct yet connected factors. Even though they involve the new
information and communication technologies, they constitute a revolution of a
social and not just a technological kind. These changes are unmaking the era of
mass communication and its social structures, through a new distribution of the
means of access to the production and reception of messages in the public
domain. This constitutes a restructuring of power in the field of representation
and communication, in which the technology of writing is deeply implicated.
Before, the power to produce messages for dissemination in the public domain
lay with the few who had access to and control of the media for disseminating
messages.
At different points in history, that access has been – and still often is – tightly
regulated by authorities of the state, the church or the ‘party’, of ‘capital’, or of
others. The relation of those who produced messages and could disseminate them
to those who received them was that of few to many. These were the conditions of
the era of mass communication. The new information and communication
technologies have produced the technological condition where all can publish to
all, and by means of that enormous change they have abolished the era of mass
communication. But this is a technological condition, and exists ‘in principle’
only, for if, in the past, power attached to the control of the means for
dissemination of information, it does so still, and it is not likely that that power will
be ceded easily and without contest by those who have it now to those who do
not have that power. In other words, the potentials of these technologies imply a
radical social change, a redistribution of semiotic power, the power to make and
disseminate meanings. This change becomes even more potent now, when the
new economies are increasingly economies in which information is both the
major resource in production and the main commodity for consumption.
The change to existing distributions of power could only come about with
such relative ease – so far at least – because the previous structures of control of
that power had become radically unsettled, through the effects of globalisation.
However clichéd and contested the concept may be, globalisation of both finance
capital and popular culture – all cultural production is ‘popular’ the moment it
becomes a commodity – is a fact. Its effects at the level of the ‘Western’ nation
state have been to dissolve both the frames which had held structures of power in
place and the connections that obtained between them.
First and foremost of these were the previously tight relations of nation state
and national economy on the one hand, and of nation state, national economy and
the meanings and values of ‘citizenship’ on the other. Other institutions, such as
the church or ‘the party’, have played significant roles, semi-independently of
state and economy. But from these connections all power flowed, and all