Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Chapter Thirteen The New Literacies

chapter thir teen The New Literacies Technology and Cultural Form w il li am ur ic ch io Given the centrality of the word literacy in this essay’s argument and the sense that its meaning has changed to the point that it must be invoked in the plural (even at the risk of creating a neologism), tracing its historical contours seems a useful place to begin. The Oxford English Dictionary, that chronicler of changing language usage, has something rather interesting to say about the terms ‘‘literate’’ and ‘‘literacy .’’ The former first appeared in English in the mid–fifteenth century, only a few years before Gutenberg’s demonstration of the printing press, and underwent significant modulation in the seventeenth century —a pattern of definitional activity that can easily be read against the very different explanatory backdrops offered by Adrian Johns, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Elizabeth Eisenstein.1 If the fifteenth-century usage of the term called into relief the strict demarcations between those who could read and had access to the written word and those who could not or did not, the seventeenth-century sense of the word was more concerned with letters and literature and assumed not only more widespread functional literacy but also hierarchies of readerly taste and relevance. Key usages of ‘‘literacy,’’ by contrast, appear in two clusters: one in the late nineteenth century and one in the mid– to late twentieth century . In the case of the late nineteenth century, the term’s definitional activity must be read against the period’s great movement of populations , its project of urbanization, and the notions of social and national 229 230 William Uricchio cultural coherence that accompanied these changes. Such occurrences as the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), the rise of the public library movement, changes in the rotary press, and the panic over ‘‘dime novels’’ all, in various ways, testified to the potential social impact of literature—and literacy—as a forces for maintaining social stability or undermining it.2 By the mid– to late twentieth century, the project of rationalization and specialization seen by Weber as characterizing the modern age seemed well established, with various new media channels and newly relevant cultural competencies (from ‘‘television literacy’’ to ‘‘economic literacy’’) rising to the fore. Yet the relative stability of the definition of literacy (as the reading and writing of words) until this point seems curious. In the West at any rate, our long-term shifting and accreted emphases on the spoken word, the written and printed word, the photographic and acoustic trace, and most recently data sets and algorithms, all testify to an ongoing series of transformations, and not merely the changes introduced in the mid– to late twentieth century. The coincidence of photography and phonography , for example, with the theories of signs discussed by Charles Sanders Peirce and others by the end of the nineteenth century offers early precedents for a more embracing sense of the term ‘‘literacy.’’ The histories of both ‘‘literate’’ and ‘‘literacy’’ map onto explicit social dynamics. This should not surprise us, given the inherently social dimension of any language-based system of expression. In any case, this realization helps to recall the residue of power and hierarchization that lingers on in these historically encrusted terms. And it provides one compelling reason to rethink these notions through our contemporary reorganization of social power, whether something as ‘‘simple’’ as shifting reader-writer relations or as diffused as globalization. There is also a second compelling reason to reconsider and perhaps redefine these terms. If we, like the Oxford English Dictionary, take literacy to mean ‘‘the quality or state of being literate; knowledge of letters; condition in respect to education, esp. ability to read and write,’’ then it is not at all surprising that the meanings of the word continue to shift, reflecting, in the case of our present, the demands of the digital media environment and the affordances it has provided for new forms of social interaction. Networked computers; data streams of word, image, and sound; the breakdown of traditional cultural filters and brokering mechanisms; the blurring of producer and user in some settings; and the rise of new collaborative literary forms such as wikis, bulletin boards, and blogs have all contributed to new and widely embraced practices. The New Literacies: Technology and Cultural Form 231 Rather than offer a new de...