Page 31 - Literacy in the New Media Age

20 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

time, leaning heavily still on the temporal logic of speech, though shaped also by
centuries of the practices of writing (in English, say). The logic of writing is
temporal/sequential; the elements of speech certainly, and those of writing in a
quasi-fashion, unfold in time and in sequence. In speech that sequence is
temporal, in writing it is linear/spatial, with a quasi-temporality as I read along
the line, in time. The logic of image on the other hand is spatial/simultaneous.
All the elements of the image are related in spatial arrangements, and they are
simultaneously present. Writing is the ordering of elements (syntactic/
grammatical and lexical) in the conventionalised sequences of syntax; image is
the ordering of elements (‘depictions’) in a more or less conventionalised and
spatially simultaneous ‘display’. This latter form of relations between elements,
this logic, dominates the screen. In writing, much of the meaning of the text and
of its parts derives from the arrangements of syntax; in the image, much of the
meaning of the image derives from the spatial relations of the depicted elements.
When writing appears on the screen, as it does now and will continue to do, it
will increasingly – as is indeed the case now – be reshaped by this logic. Writing
will more and more become organised and shaped by the logic of the image-
space of the screen. This is one inescapable effect of the potentials of the screen,
and the technology of the new media.
Just as the medium of the book, in its reciprocal relations with writing, shaped
that mode and what that mode could do, so the new relations of the medium of
screen with the mode of writing will shape all aspects of the form of writing.
This is beginning to happen already, and it will reshape the possibilities of the
arrangements of knowledge, information and ideas. The screen offers entirely
different possibilities of arrangements, formal and therefore conceptual, to those
of the page.
The second issue mentioned above, is that of the (re)new(ed) emergence of the
mode of image into the domain of public communication. Of course, image has
always ‘been there’, even in the book, as illustration. Certainly it has been on the
walls of churches, and there often accompanied by the explanatory speech of the
priest, ‘this is the life of our lord’, and there often as a full means of
communication. At the moment image is coming ever more insistently into the
domain of everyday communication, as a full means of representing ideas,
information and knowledge. Coupled as it is with the simultaneous switch from
the dominance of the book to that of the screen, that is, a switch from the medium
that privileged writing to the medium that privileges image, it is clear that the
increasing prevalence of image will have profound effects on writing. The major
one among these derives from what I will call the ‘functional specialisation’ of
modes.
If two modes – say, image and writing – are available and are being used for
representing and communicating, it is most likely that they will be used for
distinct purposes: each will be used for that which it does best and is therefore
best used for. Two consequences arise: one, each mode carries only a part of
the informational ‘load’; no mode fully carries all the meaning. Two, each of the