Page 73 - Literacy in the New Media Age

62 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

Writing, we might note at this point, is to make marks on a surface, in order to
record something. What the marks are is not initially the issue – runes, letters,
images, visual designs, characters. It may be useful to keep in mind and to make
the distinction between a writing system using letters – for which the term
‘literacy’ is entirely apt, and writing systems which do not use letters, such as
those of China (‘characters’), Japan (‘characters’ and syllable signs); in the past
those of Central America (petroglyphs), South America, Egypt (hieroglyphs),
and elsewhere in the world even now, such as the recording systems of
Australian aboriginal people. That distinction makes it possible to study the
characteristics of each writing/recording system on its own terms, a step which is
essential if we are to get near to an understanding of what human cultures have
done and do now. It also avoids using ‘literacy’ as a ‘concessive’ term, trying to
ensure that no negative judgements are made on people who do not use lettered
writing. Clearly it is not at all essential to have the alphabet in order to have a
writing system. What is essential is to know what each system can do and does
do, what the affordances of each system are.
This book deals with a writing system founded on the alphabet in its Roman
form, so called. Writing, whether it is represented by letters or by other means, is
a graphic matter, a matter of sight rather than of sound, of marks made on a
surface, a kind of image in two-dimensional space rather than a sound
(sequence) in time. In the first place, writing is marks on a surface, in orders of a
specific kind; it is a visual matter. For instance, we are used to recognising words
in alphabetic writing because sequences of letters are marked off on each side by
empty space from other sequences of letters. This is a visual convention. In
medieval times and even into early modern Europe, writing did not have spaces
to mark off words from each other – knowing the words of writing came from
knowing the words in language-as-speech. The framing conventions and devices
of speech were then so tangibly present and felt, in the transliterations of speech
which writing then was, that words needed no graphic boundaries.
The early writing of children provides very good insights in this respect. Some
of their early writing shows how they attend to visual aspects: often it consists of
nonsense sequences of letters with spaces between them. These show that
children recognise ‘words’ as visual units – I use the scare-quotes here to
indicate that we cannot actually know whether these units have any of the
significance of ‘word’ for the child-writers. What is clear is that they see them as
significant visual entities.
Similarly, their transliterations of sound-sequences into lettered form show that
this question of word-boundaries is a convention and has to be learned; they
often have great difficulty in knowing what the graphic units/words are.
There are other visual units in writing: the line, for instance, is significant in
many forms of writing; the paragraph is a visual unit as much as a meaning unit
within the text.
Of course, letters and arrangement of letters as words (whether as approximate
transcription of sounds or as the transcription of ‘ideas’ directly through the