Page 29 - Literacy in the New Media Age

18 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

relevant value systems, public and private, were derived. It was these
connections which produced and sustained the structures of the mass society, the
economies of mass-production, ‘mass’ institutions such as hospitals, police
forces, the mass (conscription-based) army, schools, railways and, of course, the
institutions of mass communication, the publishing industry in general, books,
newspapers and, later, radio and terrestrial television. All these together
produced a tightly organised value system to give meaning to all aspects of lives
lived in that structure of frames.
The uses and the forms of literacy have been tied into these structures, and
still remain tied into their new configurations. Individual users of the technology
of ‘literacy’ are integrated into such webs of structures. In making their
meanings as messages in these webbed domains, individuals constantly sustain,
produce and transform the resources of the technology of literacy, in line with
the needs, demands, meanings and desires which they live and experience in
these environments. In this way the shape of the resources becomes, and then is,
an expression and reflection of the meanings that individuals make. To use a
small example, we know that levels of formality, as one index of social power
relations, have changed; this is reflected in the resources of language and hence
of literacy through their use in the contexts of the new social arrangements. If the
boundaries of (the always socially produced notions of ) the public and the
private have changed, or have become seemingly more blurred, or have in some
cases disappeared, then the markers of those boundaries will also change in the
resources of literacy. One such set of markers of the distinction between the
public and the private concerned a more or less strongly maintained difference in
use of (informal) speech, that is, speech relatively unmarked for power-
difference, and (formal) writing, that is, writing marked by power-difference. In
that situation it was regarded as ‘inappropriate’, inadmissible even, to use speech-
like forms in writing. Academic writing, professional writing of various kinds,
official writing, all were marked by a strict observation of this difference. The
use of the agentless passive – ‘it has been claimed that …’ – was one such marker
in academic writing; another was the use of highly complex sentence syntax. All
these are now beginning to disappear, at different pace in different domains. So,
for example, in some disciplines, and in some universities in the English-
speaking world, it is no longer required to write theses or academic articles using
such forms.
Of course, these changes have been spurred along by the rapid development of
the ‘new media’. But to look for the explanation for such changes in the new
technologies, in communication more widely, or in the resource of literacy more
narrowly, is to mistake the effect for the cause. Technologies become significant
when social and cultural conditions allow them to become significant. The new
information and communication technologies have both made possible and been
a part of the more profound force of (economic and cultural) globalisation. The
unfettered movement of finance capital is made technologically possible by
electronic communication, though it is made politically possible by the