Page 93 - Literacy in the New Media Age

82 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

In your first circuits you used torch bulbs joined with wires. Modern
electrical equipment uses the same basic ideas.

Of course I would not say that there is anything resembling the rhetoric of
Milton’s sentence in the example from 1936 (written for 13-year-old students);
there is something of the syntactic complexity. And there is nothing of the social
diversity of Trapnell’s sentences in the 1988 example (also written for 13-year-
olds) but there is something of the syntax. What all the examples illustrate is the
responsiveness of the resource to the needs of the writers in their social and cultural
environments, and the socially shaped characteristic of that often too abstractly
thought about notion of the sentence.
There are two other points to be made here. One concerns technology and its
effects and influences. By the time of Milton and Trapnell, the printing press,
with its movable type, had superseded the scribe and his practices, but the
traditions left by the scribe and the forms of both the elites and the non-elites
immediately colonised the new technology and the medium. The other point
goes somewhat in the opposite direction: yes, the old resources colonised the new
technology, but at the same time the affordances offered by the new technology
reshaped the resources. The printing press had its effects on writing and on the
sentence. The written sentence as we still know it is as much an effect of the
affordances of that technology in interaction with the users and the environments
of use as it is an effect of the resources which had been brought from the past to
writing for print. These are essential points to be borne in mind in thinking about
literacy at a time when the effects of technology are again overwhelmingly
present.
At a time of deep change it may be necessary to look at both past and future.
What were the shapes of the past brought forward into the era of the printing
press? And what shapes are we carrying forward, unbeknown to ourselves?
What are the discernible shapes of the near future? It is clear, as I have suggested,
that we are moving out of an era of relative stability of a very long duration. In
debates on literacy we tend to be focused even now – often entirely implicitly –
on the industrial revolution and its effects in so many ways. But we also know
that the invention of the printing press predates the early period of
industrialisation by a good two centuries, and indeed it is often held that the
invention of printing by using movable type represents the first stage in the
process of mass industrial production. The significant point, however, is that
when the printing press became commonly available, and replaced the medieval
scribe – whether at the court or in the church – it was the forms of writing of the
medieval scribe which came to dominate the new technology. What lessons are
to be learned from that?