a view informed by the problems of traditional literacy in a digital age

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Ronald Soetaert & Bart Bonamie
up with convincing rationales, rationales that also can convince the general
public. We would like to stress the fact that the study of languages and
culture in particular can teach us a kind of critical literacy towards new
media.
Apart from the fact that the new media will have deep implications for
artistic expression, we can also experience how in art and language the
expressions of the future are explored and constructed. The cultural
heritage will be influenced by these new interfaces: ‘Hypertext is invading
the traditional realms of content provision in data, text, sound, and video. It
is changing the rules of space-based storage, distribution, and delivery of
books, records, tapes, video and film’ (De Kerckhove, 1997, p. xxviii).
Digitalisation has dematerialised traditional memory-support devices such as
books, tapes and records … Indeed, we are witnessing a major shift in
culture, from memory-based to intelligence-based production: ‘We are
moving from the era of ‘replay’ to that of ‘remake’. We are developing
computer-assisted cognitive habits and computer-assisted forms of
collaboration – new forms, in fact, of connectedness’ (De Kerckhove, 1997,
p. xxix).
How will technology transform content? Or enhance a transformation
that has already started? As the new media are reinventing culture, they also
reinvent the ‘disciplines’ we are teaching, the institutions in which we are
teaching, the way in which we are learning. Indeed, new media are more
about access and connectedness; new media are also content-driven.
In producing information, we all share the digital code (1s and 0s).
Because all these 1s and 0s can be changed, fixed ‘truth’ has been
problematised. The results are contingent, transformable and situated truths.
So, the arts and humanities become a province of rhetoric: ‘Rhetoric
becomes … a general theory for all the arts, and, as well, the structure for a
central curriculum in the arts and letters’ (Lanham, 1993, p. 16). For
Lanham, languages are leading the dance; that ‘the arts, and the theoretical
debate that tags along after them, have done the leading, and digitisation
has emerged as their condign embodiment’ (Lanham, 1993, p. 51). ‘Leading
the dance’ is a nice compliment for language teachers, but leadership asks
for a vision.
Teaching Languages and Literature in a Digital Age
Book and Screen
It is difficult to make prophecies but we cannot deny or escape the fact that
new technologies affect the way we use language, and how new genres and
discourses are emerging. From this perspective, it is tempting to start
thinking about what is happening with reading and writing because
computers have a major impact on these skills.
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