Page 30 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 19

global power of transnational finance capital; it has provided the conditions of
that freedom. The same applies to the free movement around the globe of
cultural commodities – whether the products of Holly- or Bollywood. The free
movement of cultural commodities has been as significant in unmaking the
formerly relative stabilities and distinctiveness of cultural forms and values as
have the effects of economic globalisation, even if differently so. Cultural
globalisation has been the servant of economic globalisation in two ways. It has
provided the conditions of the appearance of ‘naturalness’ to the globalisation of
capital. After all, if it has become commonplace that I have access to the cultural
products of anywhere, here, in my locality, it will seem perverse that other
commodities should not be equally available. Cultural globalisation has prepared
the ground for a global market for commodities which are in any case now more
and more ‘cultural’.

The new environment of writing
It is there that we need to look to understand the changes in communicational
practices, those of literacy included, which are remaking the world around us.
However, from the point of view of this book, a book focused on literacy in the
new media age, there are two issues of absolute significance which bear more
directly on communication through writing. The first relates to the media of
communication: the effects of the ubiquity and dominance of the ‘screen’, and its
effect on writing. The second concerns not the media but the modes of
communication: the ever-increasing presence of image – in all forms – in
contemporary messages.
To make a comment briefly on both of these, until relatively recently – say the
last three or four decades – the medium for the dissemination of writing was the
book and the page. An entirely reciprocal relation existed between the medium
(the book or page) and the mode (writing). The forms of writing structured the
appearance of the page, as much as the organisation of the book. Conversely, the
book and the page gave shape to far-reaching aspects of the grammatical and
textual forms of writing. This extended from sentence to paragraph to chapter –
to all aspects of the conceptual shaping of ideas in writing, to the sentence as a
complex idea, to the chapter as a coherent exposition of an internally cohesive
‘body’ of knowledge – and to the aesthetics, the ‘look’, of writing. This could be
the shape and look of writing on the page, or the size of chapters and of sections
of the book. The logic of the mode of writing shaped and organised the book and
its pages. The potentials of the medium of the book and the page gave rise both
to the shaping of knowledge and ideas and to the distributions of power between
those who could produce the written text and distribute the book and those who
received the book and its text as authoritative objects.
If the book was organised and dominated by the logic of writing, the screen is
organised and dominated by the image and its logic. The logic of
(alphabetic) writing, to say this briefly at this stage, is the logic of sequence in