Page 60 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 49

images on the page as well as the appearance of the order of the screen in the
layout of pages. In other words, even if we were to constrain our attention to
pages alone, it would not be possible to ignore the effect of the ordering
principles of the screen in their effects on writing.
The new media of information and communication have facilities which differ
from those of the older media of book and page. Above all these consist in the
potentials for action by writers and readers, makers of texts and remakers of
texts, the matter, so called, of interactivity; they consist also, and as importantly,
in the hugely greater facility for using a number of modes in the making of texts.
This facility, the ready, easy use of images, means that image is readily available
for representation and communication. I do not wish to argue that the
technological facility is leading the change, not at all. But the technological
facility coincides with social, cultural, economic and political changes, all of
which together are producing and pushing that change.
Older aims in relation to literacy are simply no longer sufficient. In the era of
the modernist state, of its secondary industries of mass-production, of the mass-
organisation of that state’s bureaucracy and economy, competent use of a
resource, whatever it might have been, was prized. Competent use envisaged
both a stable system of resources for representing – ‘the’ grammar of ‘the’
language – and a user of that system who was content with being able to use this
resource competently. He or she would ‘acquire’ that grammar – whether as a
first speaker of the language or as a learner of the resource as a foreign language
to a level where competent use could be more or less guaranteed – at least at the
level required, hence the notion of functional literacy.
This was never really a plausible model of language, of literacy, or of human
beings as learners, though in a world of relative stability the fiction projected by
the model could be sustained, even if with some effort, because of its utility in
those circumstances. But the demands of communication now are such that
something else is needed. In a world of stability, the competence of reliable
reproduction was not just sufficient, but of the essence – on the production line
as much as at the writing desk. In a world of instability, reproduction is no
longer an issue: what is required now is the ability to assess what is needed in
this situation now, for these conditions, these purposes, this audience – all of
which will be differently configured for the next task.
What is required is the facility for design. Design does not ask, ‘what was
done before, how, for whom, with what?’ Design asks, ‘what is needed now, in
this one situation, with this configuration of purposes, aims, audience, and with
these resources, and given my interests in this situation?’ This corresponds in any
case to the dominant – that is, mythically leading – social, cultural and economic
environment at the moment. In a multimodal environment the realisations of this
are aided by the varying affordances of the modes and the facilities of the new
media of information and communication. It is possible to choose, not merely
with full competence within one mode – where of course design decisions were
made even if they were not called that but were called ‘stylistic choices’ – but