Page 69 - Literacy in the New Media Age

58 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

him mastery over his environment’ and ‘In your first circuits you used torch
bulbs joined with wires. Modern electrical equipment uses the same basic ideas.
But if you look inside a computer there are not many wires or torch bulbs.’ Apart
from the noticeable difference in gendered aspects of language, we can see that
the first sentence is syntactically complex; it consists of five clauses: ‘man has
been turning his wits’; ‘the problem is …’; ‘how to increase the small force’; ‘he
can exert’; ‘give him mastery …’ This kind of syntax is entirely usual for written
texts in that period, the 1950s. By contrast, the sentences from the later text, from
1988, have one or two clauses, never more.
The definition of what a sentence is has proved notoriously elusive; my
definition here is intended to serve my argument about gains and losses. If we
take a clause as the report of an event or of a state of affairs in the world, a
sentence is then a unit in which one or more such reports are unified into one
complex representational and communicational entity. Simple things are joined,
in often complex ways, to become complex things. A sentence, by its structure,
says ‘these things all belong closely together as one conceptual whole’. Seen in
that light, the move from complex sentence-syntax to the simpler sentence-
syntax of the more recent example gives away the means for constructing
conceptually complex things. It is at this point that I believe the argument starts:
what kind of use(fulness) attaches to such forms? Can we imagine a cultural
world in which we do not have the means of making such complexes? Of course
we can imagine humans not trained in the conceptual complexities of such
forms, and not able to produce them – those who live largely in the world of
speech do; they have forms which have constructed different means of being
complex. But still, this is a resource which can be available to all. What
cognitive and cultural consequences follow if that resource is no longer
available?
At the same time, the page where the simple sentences quoted above occur is
multimodally constructed (see Figure 9.7). A part of the task of reading that page
is to make meaning from the two modes independently and in conjunction. This
is a conceptually new task, and though we do not at the moment have the means
for comparing the two kinds of task, we can tell they are different. In terms of
‘reading’, the one, with the complex syntax, asks that the readerfollow the pre-
given complexitites of the syntactic reading path; the other asks that the reader
establish a reading path on the basis of criteria of her or his relevance. At the
moment it is too difficult to know just what the conceptualcognitive gains and
losses are. It is, however, possible to say, with considerable certainty, that the
tasks of reading the multimodal texts are entirely in line with tasks in quite other
domains, where what is at issue is also the establishing of ordering on the basis
of criteria of salience or relevance brought to the textby the reader, planner,
designer and so on. The economy at large seems to be organised in this manner,
from the micro-levels to the largest levels of organisation.