Page 49 - Literacy in the New Media Age

38 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

several tightly or loosely connected sentences, or the unit of the paragraph), or
clauses, or phrases, or words in phrases.
My comment about ‘filling with content’ is a contentious view of the lexical
element ‘word’. It assumes that words are signifiers, not signs – that is, that they
are forms with potentials for becoming signs. The ‘filling with content’ is then
based on our prior experience of such elements. Say that I have encountered the
signifier tree many times; each time I have encountered it, it was as a sign made
by someone. I will have used it many times, and each time I used it, it was as a
sign: the joining of a form with my meaning of that moment. I have a history of
encountering the element tree, which helps me – as does the environment in
which it is used – in forming a hypothesis about what the signified might be on
this occasion. The word/sign tree uttered on a walk in the sand-stone landscapes
around Sydney will have a different signified (a somewhat stunted, twisted,
gnarled, olive green, though beautiful plant) than it will have uttered in the
forests of southern Finland (a regularly shaped, deep green, tall, impressive,
rather than beautiful, plant). Reading as interpretation is the making of a new
sign from the sign that I have received as a signifier. I fill that signifier with my
meaning. In articulation I use a signifier, say tree, and fill it with my meaning;
on this occasion it might be some stunted thing in a large pot in a front garden,
that I need to speak or write about: ‘Your tree isn’t looking all that healthy.
Don’t you think it’d do better if you’d put it in the ground?’ Someone else might
not be prepared to use the signifier tree for this plant; having lived all their life in
the splendid forests of central Europe; their experience of the signifier tree rules
it out as a possibility.
Much the same considerations apply to knowledge about the syntactic (and
grammatical) status of the elements of writing – we know that this word functions
as a noun, as a subject or an object noun, this word functions as an adjective, and
we know what these functions mean. We draw on this as on other kinds of
knowledge to hypothesise about the significance of the combinations in which
the elements occur.
To put this very simply, when I read in my newspaper on 1 February 2002,
‘Capricorn: Good news, good news, good news. Four delightful contacts from
four gorgeous planets are making things a little easier than of late, actually a lot
easier’, I need to know what ‘news’ means – not something like ‘the news on the
radio’, and that ‘good news’ means something like ‘feel happy’ rather than ‘the
scriptures according to St John the Evangelist’. I would want to know what
‘contacts’ in ‘four delightful contacts’ might mean, and I would need to assess
just how large or small ‘little’ was in ‘a little easier’ and so on. I would also need
to know that the repetition of ‘good news’ is a form of intensification, a kind of
‘very’; that there is an implied ‘for you’ in ‘are making things a little easier than
of late’ and so on. This may seem too banal to mention even, though I believe it
is not; we have learned to assume that these things are obvious and
unproblematic, though for every reader who pays even slight attention to the