Page 32 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 21

two modes will be used for specialised tasks, the tasks which are best done with
that mode. As a consequence writing is no longer a full carrier either of all the
meaning, or of all types of meaning. Other, more directly social, reasons also
have their effects, for instance general changes in the ‘audiences’ of the various
media, which pose questions such as ‘who reads books?’, ‘for what reasons?’,
‘for what purposes?’, and similarly for all other media as well, of course.
The combined effects of the changes in the media and in the uses of modes
reach further still; they are not confined to the screen, but affect all media and all
modes. The modes which dominate the dominant medium, the screen – spatially
organised arrangements of image and writing in specific layouts – have come to
dominate pages of all kinds, and the book as well. It has frequently been
commented on that the pages of newspapers and magazines are more and more
like the screens of certain television programmes. This is true of many segments
of the print-media, of publicity materials and of textbooks, and increasingly of
‘literary’ forms such as the travelogue, the biography and even the novel. But
these new generic forms are not amenable to the same conceptual structures, the
same structures of ideas, information and knowledge as were the other, the older
forms. New textbooks are not ‘books’ in the older sense: carefully structured,
coherent expositions of knowledge, knowledge to engage with reflectively and to
‘absorb’. The new ‘books’ are often collections of worksheets; no careful
development of complex coherent structures here, and no deliberate carefully
reflective engagement with these pages. These are books to work with, to do
things with, to act with and often to act on.
In this process, writing is undergoing changes of a profound kind: in grammar
and syntax, particularly at the level of the sentence, and at the level of the text/
message. Writing now plays one part in communicational ensembles, and no
longer the part. Where before all information was conveyed in writing, now there
is a decision to be made: which information, for this audience, is best conveyed
in image and which in writing? In this form, that is a very new role for writing to
have. For those who use writing, it requires new thinking, and different
dispositions towards communication.

Writing and literacy
Clearly, then, ‘literacy’ is by no means all there is to contemporary
communication. Other resources, images above all, are used, sometimes more
insistently than those of ‘literacy’ or alphabetically written ‘words’ in
meaningful arrangements. Given that in the world of the new media there are
numerous modal resources involved in the making of ‘messages’ – word, spoken
or written; image, still and moving; music; objects as 3D models; soundtrack;
action – it has in any case become essential to ask what we mean by ‘literacy’.
Of course, that is the issue which will be explored (in theory and in examples)
throughout this book. But it may be best to have some clarification right here and
now.