Ch. 2 Notes

The book, which I just realized hasn't been identified yet in this blog, is Gunther Kress' Literacy in the New Media Age.

Kress places us at the intersection of four broad changes: social, economic, political, and technological. I hope that later in the text he elaborates on how he sees these four changes. It seems that we're always at that intersection.

Something that Kress says here about writing becoming increasingly display-oriented got me thinking about the children's drawings. Before kids formally learn to write, they draw and color. Their pictoral representations grow into "alphabetic" writing. In the past, those kids move from making pictures to making words. In the new media age that Kress is describing, do those kids stay with pictures? Or do they move from pictures to words, then back to pictures? What does increasingly image-laden text mean to kids who are first learning to write? It's possible for a child to learn how to make a movie on a computer before learning to write, or at least simulatenously. Does that happen anywhere? It must. So what does that look like and how does it affect alphabetic writing?

I would also argue that writing has long been display-oriented. The printed word includes many design elements, including the geography of the page, font design, binding, color, and the use of organizational guides.

Here's a quote that I like,
"We need to be aware however, that on the screen writing may appear with the modes of music, of colour, of (moving) image, of speech, of soundtrack. All these bear meaning, and are part of one message. The mode of writing is one part of that message, and so is partial in relation to the message overall."
Very true.
Also true is Kress' admonition that change is ever-present and that we "can neither pretend that there is stability nor demand it." There is no going back. There is no "back" to go back to.
The questions he poses on the second paragraph on page 12 seem to relate strongly to one of those wonderful conversations we had this Spring in the round room - going fast vs. going deep. Fast literacies let you jump easily from topic to topic, to cover a lot of ground and find subtle connections between seemingly disparate ideas but they don't seem to encourage exploring a single topic in depth. With ICT, there may be vast resources easily available to allow you to "go deep", but the structure doesn't seem to encourage it.

Kress also notes what we have experienced all too frequently: working with images costs time and storage space. So... very... true. There's also a little warning there about over-borrowing from other fields: "Extending one theory too far, into a domain for which it was never meant, does no one a service."

James