Page 33 - Literacy in the New Media Age

22 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

In English-speaking contexts, we have this word ‘literacy’. As it is being used
in ever-extended meanings, we might decide to stretch its use still further to
cover any resource involved in the making of any ‘message’, whether through
word or image or otherwise.
For me, two reasons speak against that. One is that we need to be aware that
other languages do not have such a word. They name the field differently:
alphabetismus in German; alphabetisme, in French as in other romance languages.
In languages which do not use a version of the alphabet, Chinese or Japanese for
instance, quite different wordings exist: in Japanese, for instance ‘the recognition
of letters’ (mon-mou); in Chinese there are a range of phrases, for instance
‘know-character-ability’, ‘normal raise/bring-up’, ‘to have received education’.
Of course, we could attempt to insist that as the English language already rules
the world, the English word literacy should do also, or that other languages
should at least produce translations of this word, as in lettramento in (Brazilian)
Portuguese, or Literalitäet in German-speaking contexts. Of course, we might
reflect on what the differences in naming actually mean, and whether the
extension of the English word literacy to all contexts of communication, or to
other cultures, to their languages and to their ways of representing, is really the
best way to go. A vast range of meanings is gathered up in the word; in
anglophone contexts it can be anything from ‘making reliable links between the
letters of a written text and the sounds of speech’ to ‘being able to make readings
of texts of the elite, which conform to the readings of the elite culture’. The more
that is gathered up in the meaning of the term, the less meaning it has. Something
that has come to mean everything, is likely not to mean very much at all.
The time is right to reflect, and to rethink radically. In any case, there are
strong reasons against imperialisms in naming, whether in a culture or across
cultures. There is also the overwhelming reason that the conditions of our
present and of the near future – economic, social, technological – are ushering in
a distinctively different era of communication. In the process some of our
culture’s most profound notions are coming under challenge: what reading is;
what the functions of writing are; what the relations of language to thinking, to
imagination, to creativity might be. Is the imagination that rests on word
different to the imagination that rests on image? A vast change is under way,
with as yet unknowable consequences. It involves the remaking of relations
between what a culture makes available as means for making meaning (what I shall
call, throughout the book, representational modes – speech, writing, image,
gesture, music and others) and what the culture makes available as means for
distributing these meanings as messages (the media of dissemination – book,
computer-screen, magazine, video, film, radio, chat and so on). ‘Literacy’, in
whatever sense, is entirely involved in that.
This is the moment for taking stock. If we do not reflect, we are likely to carry
all sorts of baggage along with us, willy-nilly and unexamined, from the former
period into the new, where it will prove more problematic than it had ever been
before. In the book I will attempt to unsettle some accepted notions, and to ask