Literacy in the New Media Age (review)

This book is one step beyond in Kress’s research on the interfaces between oral and written discourses, on the one hand, and between visual and verbal discourses, on the other, and all that is related to the issue of literacy in today’s Western societies, in which individuals have to cope with a non-stop barrage of information coming from visual media. After the acclaimed Reading images (with Theo van Leeuwen, London: Routledge, 1996) in which K proposes a grammar of visual design, K now provides us with his opinion on the heated-up debate over the influence of visual media on written discourses and on literacy in general.

The book starts with a basic claim: ‘it is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from a vast array of social, technological and economic factors’ (1). These factors are summarized in two statements: ‘on the one hand, the broad move from the now centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance of the image and, on the other hand, the move from the dominance of the medium of the book to the dominance of the medium of the screen’ (ibid.). The chapters in the book are intended to provide an insight into these two factors.

After Chs. 1 (‘The futures of literacy’, 1–8) and 2 (‘Preface’, 9–15), which are general introductions to the book, Ch. 3 (‘Going into a different world’, 16–34) starts with an insight into today’s new contexts for writing. The reasons for the change in written culture and literacy are indeed related to technology (e.g. the so-called ‘new media’), but also to the inevitable evolution of society as a whole. In the chapter, some pages are also devoted to a clearer picture of what literacy is and the role of writing (alphabet) in it. Also, the interface between the oral and written media is commented upon, for instance, the topic of transcriptions.

Ch. 4 (‘Literacy and multimodality: A the oretical framework’, 35–60) discusses the claim that linguistics alone cannot account for the complexity of literacy in the new media age. The presence of other communicative formats raises a number of important research questions that even affect the notion of ‘meaning’.

Ch. 5 (‘What is literacy? Resources of the mode of writing’, 61–83) is about how writing has changed or evolved under the pressure of oral and visual media. K asks a rhetorical question in the beginning, which he aims to discuss: ‘in what direction is writing likely to move: will it move back towards speech like forms, and become mere transcription of speech again, or will it move back in the direction of its image origins?’ (61).

Chs. 6 (‘A social theory of text: Genre’, 84–105) and 7 (‘Multimodality, multimedia and genre’, 106–21) address the notion of genre as related to literacy and in the context of today’s ubiquity of visual communication.

Finally, Chs. 8 (‘Meaning and frames’, 122–39) and 9 (‘Reading as semiosis’, 140–67) are about a proposal of new, updated analyses of genres in the new media age. The former is on punctuation, while the latter is on reading.