Page 83 - Literacy in the New Media Age

72 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

Figure 5.6 Distance post: The Peak, Hong Kong

writing systems. This is even more urgent given that in these new environments,
writing is likely to move in the direction of its image origins. The alphabet
disposes its users towards a view of language which foregrounds sound:
‘Language is sound and combinations of sounds. Meanings can be attached to
combinations of sounds. Sounds can be represented by letters’. Image-based
systems are likely to dispose their users differently: ‘Language is meaning and
combinations of meaning. Meanings can be represented by (conventionalised)
images, however abstract. Sounds can be attached to images’.
There is also the question to what extent we are entitled to speak of that
abstraction, ‘language’, rather than of the modes of speech and writing more
specifically. If we think that there is ‘language’ we may not want to treat speech
and writing as distinct modes. Each position will have quite specific
consequences, for pedagogies of writing, for instance. In cultures with alphabetic
writing systems, speech and writing are linked by the sound–letter connection
(only the most literate readers do not ‘subvocalise’ in some noticeable way, even
if noticeable only to themselves).
However, the major relation between the two modes rests on the unit of the
clause, and on what speech and writing each do syntactically/textually with the
clause. I will give an example of writing in English from the seventeenth
century, showing how the syntax/textuality of writing both drew on (as it still
does) and ‘freed’ itself from that of speech, and how that relation is newly
becoming problematic in the environment of the new technologies of information
and communication. This is most frequently talked about in relation to e-mail
and the forms of writing which it produces. In the new environment, the always