Page 36 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 25

I would want to know what it means for someone to use terms such as cultural
literacy or sexual literacy, what judgements are made, implicitly or explicitly, on
whom, and what the effects are of such judgements on those who are being
judged, on this as on other occasions. But those are general intellectual, social,
political concerns of mine, as a member of my social group.

A next step: the alphabet
This begins to answer questions such as ‘what do we mean by literacy?’ and
‘how can we begin to define the term?’ We can speak about the resource and the
use of the resource as distinct issues, aware that in practice the two are never
separable. As I mentioned, the word does not exist in other languages. Other
languages have words, as English does, for things like fruit, water, stones, food,
earth – concrete things, which are ‘there’, so to speak. ‘Literacy’, like ‘liberty’,
seems to be something that exists because a social group has decided that it does,
and has given it a name whose grammatical status as noun suggests that it has a
real existence. Other social groups seem not to see it in that way at all. It is worth
asking ‘why not?’ and to ask what it is that they see. The cultures that make
mention of the alphabet in some way clearly recognise its effects, but do not,
seemingly, go beyond that in their initial naming.
The alphabet does two things: it tends to act as a means for representing the
sounds of speech, in some more or less direct way; it is also now a means,
directly, without going via speech, for using graphic elements on a page or on a
screen. This dual function is worth following further, if only because the second
aspect is frequently lost sight of. It is not necessary to be able to connect the
sounds of speech with the letters of an alphabet in order to be able to read or to
write. ‘Sight recognition’ of words works perfectly well for many people. Nor do
those who are speech- and hearing-impaired, for instance, need to hear a word ‘in
their heads’ or in their ears in order to read it. This is much the same as when I
am in Italy or France, where I do not need to understand the shopkeeper’s
(spoken) mention of the price of my purchase, just so long as I can see the figure
on the electronic display at the till, or she is prepared to write out the numbers on
a bit of paper for me, in the market, say.
The alphabet can be a bridge between the spoken version of a ‘language’ and
its written form, and like any well-used bridge it keeps the two sides in touch
with what is on the other side. The written form is tied, relatively, to spoken
versions, as is obvious in the case of the ‘assimilation’ of loan-words. There it
tends to be the spoken version that influences the written. But the fact that
writing has a power of its own becomes obvious in cases when there is an attempt
at ‘spelling-reform’, when reformers meet a reluctance to let the archaic written
form be brought into line with current pronunciations – say, the case of ‘knight’
versus ‘nite’. The written version cannot move too far from the spoken, lest
it become ‘unreadable’. But at the same time, in a literate society, the written
form exercises a constant pressure on the spoken form, slowing the speed of