TASKs for democracy

TASK SHEET 1
Now we’re talking – in writing
In earlier societies, where most communication was based on oral speech and dialogue, that is where there
was little writing and reading, each bit of language use was placed in a situation. A feature of oral communication
then and now is that speech proceeds in time as one thinks of what to say, or it proceeds according
to a memorised plan. The speech situation, that is the people and objects that are present, the topological
features of the room or the natural environment in and around the speaker, affect what is said and how it is
said. People and objects may be pointed to as further explication of who or what is meant by the words, gestures
may emphasise certain utterances, etc. In earlier times, the form of a formal speech was also influenced
by the fact that it had to be memorised, often yielding a chronological structure.
Some say (e.g. Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato, 1963) that in the historic transition from orality to literacy, a
shift which can be observed in Greek culture at the end of the 5th century, there was also a shift in the way
of thinking. Writing does not require memorisation; a written text does not need the memorising help that a
chronological structure may provide. Hence writing is often organised by way of other principles than time. It
is often structured by way of dichotomies (e.g. pro/contra), or by way of a subordinating structure (e.g. general
point/examples, general point/arguments), all of which are static ways of organising thoughts, not temporal.
Importantly, too, written texts are much less dependent on the situation of the writing act. In fact, writing
requires that the writer is able to lift the form and the content of the text out of the particular act of writing, so
that the text can be understood outside of that particular situation. It requires of the writer to take a step aside
and look at the text from the outside, from a potential reader’s viewpoint, and to adapt the text accordingly.
The shift from orality to literacy – writing and reading – promoted a distanced, non-situated, static way of
thinking. It also promoted one-way “communication” – corresponding to the monologue in orality – in the
way that it is not possible to interrupt the text, that is readers who are impatient or who disagree can stop
reading, but the text is still there, as a whole. And the author of the text does not expect immediate responses
(see Skjeveland 2009 for more on these aspects).
Today in a wide variety of writing acts, an immediate reply is exactly what one expects, for example, when
emailing, SMS-ing, chatting or participating in other forms of social networking. The texts of such communication
may be accompanied by photos, pictures, videos, etc., explicating and situating the written text in
ways that resemble orality. Obama did it, and it worked for him. Now every politician wants to communicate
through new media. But some politicians are still stuck in the old ways of thinking when it comes to literacy,
which is why they write non-situated, static monologues on the Internet. They do not open up and explain
their situation to the people out there so they can recognise it and respond to it.
Most young people in the West, on the other hand, are small Obamas in this respect. They use new media and
social networking applications more or less all the time. They know how to create a shared situation for textsender
and text-receiver, they know how to make the communication situation dynamic and not static, and
they expect, encourage, prepare for and handle responses. Still, communication consists of a lot of writing.
This is then what we call the new literacy.
Most young people are like Obama, yes, but not all. This is where teachers and schools come in. The “spreading”
from teachers to students of practice with Web 2.0 applications such as the blog is one (small, but feasible) step
towards obtaining better media literacy for all, which in turn is a prerequisite for Article 10 of the European
Convention on Human Rights on freedom of expression. The problem is that some teachers and trainee teachers
are a bit like the old literacy politicians mentioned above; they are not aware of the differences between
old literacy and new literacy. Also they do not understand the technicalities of new media and therefore try
to avoid the whole issue.
TASKs for democracy Page 146