Page 45 - Literacy in the New Media Age

34 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

meaning of ‘Mary came into the room, and Bill left’ or ‘Bill came into the room,
and Mary left’. These potentials shape the forms and meanings of speech, and as
echoes, shape the forms and meanings of writing, in all respects. The logic of
space (and the absence of the demands of the logics of time) equally has
consequences for planning and reception, and therefore for structures at any
level – graphic marks, sentences, sub-textual and textual units. It also holds
potentials, largely those of display in space. The material of sound has potentials
which the material of the graphic does not, and vice versa. Each offers
complementary potentials to other resources: display in space offers the
complementary meanings of image and writing; sequence in time offers the
complementary possibilities of gesture and speech. And similarly with all other
materials, whether of sound, of graphic marks, of gesture, of action or of 3D
construction.
These differences in potential can be worked and have been, in different
cultures and in different historical periods, into the distinctive potentials of
different modes. At times similarities have been foregrounded. The points at
which there are contacts of particular strengths between speech and writing are
between letter and sound; between spoken word and written word; and, a major
point of contact, at the level of the unit of the clause. It could be said that
‘language’ is the modal resource which is distinctive and unified by having
names in arrangements; and which differs from the mode of the visual, for
instance, in the logics and the materialities of that realisation. Perhaps the
connections at these points are strong enough to retain the notion of ‘language’
as an important one.
At the present moment we are once again at a point where the relation of
speech and writing, and the questions around ‘language’, are being remade. The
new technologies of information and communication are playing a significant
role in that, and one part of my aim in this book is to describe and to speculate
about that new set of relations, and the consequent changes to speech, to writing,
and above all, of course, to the notion of ‘literacy’.