Page 34 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 23

questions in areas which might seem too obvious to need questioning even now.
I hope that the result will be worthwhile.

Literacy

To put it baldly at this point, and before I have presented any of the arguments,
for me literacy is the term to use when we make messages using letters as the
means of recording that message. When we communicate through numbers, we
use the term ‘numeracy’, and for very good reasons: the meaning-potential and
the meanings made with numbers are very different from those made with
letters. This is so even though we can retranscribe numbers into letters and
words, as when the stall-holder says ‘that’ll be five euros seventy-five cents’. My
approach leaves us with the problem of finding new terms for the uses of the
different resources: not therefore ‘visual literacy’ for the use of image; not
‘gestural literacy’ for the use of gesture; and also not ‘musical literacy’ or
‘soundtrack literacy’ for the use of sound other than in speech; and so on.
It may be that when we speak in popular, everyday contexts, these metaphoric
uses, extending infinitely – visual literacy, gestural literacy, musical literacy,
media literacy, computer-, cultural-, emotional-, sexual-, internet- and so on and
so on – are fine, though I have my doubts even then. I would want to exclude
another currently fashionable use of the term, which is to indicate certain kinds
of production-skills associated more or less closely with aspects of
communication, as in computer literacy, or (aspects of) media literacy. Instead I
want to make a threefold distinction in our naming-practices:

1 words that name the resources for representing and their potential – speech,
writing, image, gesture;
2 words that name the use of the resources in the production of the message –
literacy, oracy, signing, numeracy, (aspects of) ‘computer literacy’ and of
‘media literacy’, ‘internet-literacy’; and
3 words that name the involvement of the resources for the dissemination of
meanings as message – internet publishing, as one instance.

The new technologies of information and communication complicate this picture
seriously, in that they bring together the resources for representation and their
potential with the resources of production and the resources of dissemination. It
is this conflation which has led to some of the too ready extension of the term
‘literacy’: using the computer has aspects of all three. It is difficult to deal with
this neatly. On the one hand the computer brings all three together. On the other
hand, to use writing, whether on the screen or on the page, is to be involved
specifically with that resource – writing – and its potentials; to use images
whether on the screen or on the page, similarly. These are distinct resources and
require distinct competencies in their use and their design, no matter whether on
the page or on the screen. To use both modes, image and writing, together, as is