Page 35 - Literacy in the New Media Age

24 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

ever more frequently the case with the new technologies, is to be involved in the
use of the resources of visual composition (layout), in the use of the visual mode
of image, in the use of the mode of writing, and all in ways which both draw on
the existing knowledges and resources and yet are also quite new.
When we see the finished message, it seems as though the maker of the
message has simply made use of everything that was there to use, that she or he
has drawn on whatever resources were available and serviceable, without
distinguishing between resources. Yet even now, in this situation of change and
flux, we can tell differences: between the use of the mode of writing and that of
image, between the page that works, the screen that looks good, and those which
do not. If we have the means, the knowledge, however implicit, for making
discriminations, then clearly we have the means for making the complex design
decisions also, in the first place.
Given this situation, I think it is more important than ever to understand the
meaning-potentials of the resources as precisely and as explicitly as we can, to
keep things clear and distinct where we can, at one level. The sculptor must know
the potentials of this kind of wood, of that kind of stone, of these metals, of
silicone and of fibreglass. The designer must know what resources will best meet
the demands of a specific design for a specific audience. Both of them would be
puzzled and fail to understand an approach that did not start from such knowledge,
from knowing what the different modes are and what they can best do.
So to return to the issue: we can have writing or speech as the names of two
resources for making meaning. Using pencil, pen, (computer) keyboard or
whatever else are then separate and different matters, involving the skills of both
production and dissemination, which may be more or less closely integrated with
the potentials of the resource. Literacy remains the term which refers to (the
knowledge of) the use of the resource of writing. The combination of knowledge
of the resource with knowledge of production and perhaps with that of
dissemination would have a different name. That separates, what to me is
essential, the sense of what the resource is and what its potentials are, from
associated questions such as those of its uses, and the issue of whatever skills are
involved in using a resource in wider communicational frames.
It also separates the issue entirely from that further set of metaphoric
extensions, as in cultural, emotional, sexual, social literacy, and many more.
Literacy, in all its aspects, is entirely social, cultural and personal. And so, of
course, all matters social and cultural, economic and political, as much as those
which are affective or emotional, have their impact. But that is not, for me, a
good enough reason to bring all these into discussions of literacy in an
undifferentiated way. I have no objections if such terms are used in popular
settings, or if such usages exist. There is in any case an absolute need to keep
popular and academic modes of working and naming quite separate. The danger
of extending the term too far is that of dragging things which are and should
remain entirely outside the social regulations that literacy is subject to into that
domain, to push social regulation into domains where there is no need for it to exist.