Page 44 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 33

that the new technologies permit a ready and easy choice: shall I represent this as
written text or as image? The increasing use of images on screens as elsewhere
demands an answer to that question. Is that which I wish to ‘say’ a different thing
when it is said in the mode of speech or in the mode of writing or in the mode of
image? While we use the abstraction ‘language’, this cannot be posed as a
question. But if ‘literacy’ is both a resource and a skill in the use of the resource,
a technology for ‘handling’ meaning, then I need to know at least as much about
the materials I wish to use as the sculptor needs to know about the materials for
sculpting. What meanings depend on the use and the potentials of the resource of
writing, or on that of speech, or on both, or on the resources of ‘language-as-
such’ contrasted, say, with ‘image’? If speech and writing are distinct in
important ways, then what remains as the unifying factor for the term
‘language’?
My approach is that the potentials of the resources of speech and of writing are
distinct, at many levels and in many ways. Their difference as material stuff
determines that that is so. At the same time, cultures do very different things with
the materials on which they work. Writing cultures have shaped the resources of
writing in many different ways, which means that we need to know the social
meanings that inhere in the resource as we have it available to us now. Societies
attribute different values to the resources of speech and of writing, and regulate
the relation between them in different ways. Hence we need to understand what
social regulations govern their relation now, for whom, in what environments.
Depending on the strength of such regulations, any individual’s sense of the
relation of speech and writing will differ, and for a variety of reasons. For some
members of a writing culture, writing will be the transcription of speech; for
others, the two will be quite distinct. Others will have a clear sense of the
variability of that relation, either in general or in specific circumstances. When I
came to understand for myself, some twenty-five years ago, that this relation and
its formal expression had much to do with social power and the maintenance of
social groups, I made a decision to make my own writing closer to the ‘rhythms’
of informal speech than to those of formal academic writing. I wanted to make my
writing indicate solidarity with a wider group of readers with a more general
professional interest rather than solidarity with a small and elite group of my
academic peers.
Throughout the book I will come to detailed discussion of how writing and
speech ‘work’, as resources for making meaning. Here I will simply say again
that the two fundamental differences are on the one hand the ‘logics’ of time and
space, and on the other hand the material stuff of sound and of graphic marks, of
light. The logic of time has consequences for planning speech and for its
reception, and hence consequences for the structures of speech at any level –
textual and sub-textual units, sentences, clauses, words, sounds. The potentials of
sequence in time are many, from the meanings of temporal ordering – what is
mentioned first or last, the difference in meaning between ‘Bill married
Mary’ and ‘Mary married Bill’ for instance; to the meanings of causality, the