Page 59 - Literacy in the New Media Age

48 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

be the site of emergence of a number of discourses at the same time, more or less
effectively interwoven.
There is an important question of naming and definition to be dealt with
around the term text. Does it refer to linguistically realised entities alone? Or
only to those realised in writing? Can it include message entities which
consist of image and writing? And if it can, do we then refer to the written part
of the text differently than we do to the visual? One reason for the long use of
‘text’ for written entities alone was of course the fact that there had been no
possibility of a record of spoken realisations until relatively recently; it is only
over the last fifty years or so that records of speech could be made with some
ease. Once these means had become available, the term ‘text’ began to be used
for (recorded and/or transcribed) spoken entities as much as for written entities.
The video recorder has begun to have a similar effect for other modes –
movement, gesture, position in space. The accident of the availability of
technologies for recording is just that – an accident, even if an important
accident. The technologies should not cloud the broader theoretical issue. I will
use the term text for any instance of communication in any mode or in any
combination of modes, whether recorded or not. If it happened as communication
it will have been ‘recorded’ in any case by the participants in that
communicational event. And if this ‘recording’ is partial, as inevitably it must
be, then it is simply differently partial than is the case with recordings made with
contemporary technological means.
Texts have a site of appearance: simply, they have to appear somewhere.
These sites of appearance have their inherent and culturally produced orderings
and regularities, which have effects on the texts which appear in these sites. We
cannot afford to overlook these effects. The screen is the currently dominant site
of appearance of text, but screen is the site which is organised by the logic of
image. Hence the logic of image orders the appearance of texts – whatever their
modal realisation – on the screen. Until the last two or three decades, the page –
usually as a part of the medium of the book – was the dominant site of
appearance of text. The page was ordered by the logic of writing, even though it
often contained images. But when images appeared on the page, they appeared
subject to the logic of writing. Clearly the dominance of the screen and the fact
that the logic of image dominates there does not mean that written texts (or
writing in any form) cannot appear on the screen; they do, in enormous numbers.
What it does mean is that the logic of image comes to dominate the ordering,
shape, appearance and uses of writing. Writing will be subordinated to the logic
of the screen, to the spatial logic of the image. Writing will inevitably become
more image-like, and will be shaped by that logic. It then remains to understand
what it will mean for writing to become image-like.
There is a further effect, in that the order and logic of the dominant site of
appearance, the screen, comes to affect the site of the page, as of all other sites of
communication. It is and has been apparent for a while now that pages are
coming to resemble screens, both in terms of a much greater prevalence of