Literacy in the New Media Age | Composition Studies


	Book Reviews Issue 32.2 Fall 2004 (Online Exclusive) \| HTML Printer-Friendly Format \| Literacy in the New Media Age, by Gunther Kress. London: Routledge, 2003. 186 pages. Reviewed by Paul J. Morris II, Pittsburg State University Reading Gunther Kress’s Literacy in the New Media Age (2003) is a little like joining, in progress, a rather complicated theoretical conversation about language and literacy. In fact, Kress’s text is the latest in Routledge’s Literacies series edited by David Barton, with an editorial board comprised of several well-known literacy specialists, including David Bloome, James Gee, Shirley Brice Heath, and Greg Meyers. (Kress, a Professor of Education at the University of London, is also on the board.) My own work has been informed by Halliday, Bruner, Burke, Vygotsky, Foucault, Piaget, Weaver, and others who have influenced our field, but in the beginning I had trouble bringing these experts to bear on what seemed to be a private conversation between Kress and the other authors featured in the Literacies series. However, Kress’s use of practical language examples to support his literacy theories helped me to place his work not only alongside the researchers and theorists I’ve read and taught, but also in the context of my own teaching. Although Literacy in the New Media Age is laced with the terminology of the sociolinguist, Kress’s examples of language use (everything from Milton to web pages to newspaper horoscopes to the emergent writing of children) eventually invite the uninitiated to join in his discussion of literacy and human communication as a meaning-making or social semiotic process. Kress worries that our current linguistic theories of literacy do not take into account the multimodality of communication in the new media age: “a linguistic theory cannot provide a full account of what literacy does or is; language alone cannot give us access to the meaning of the multimodally constituted message. . .” (35). In his previous work, Kress contends that the word has been crowded off the page (or screen) by image and that image has supplanted text as the most resourceful way to teach (or reach) a generation of students more adept at reading multimodal texts than purely alphabetic texts. Furthermore, he notes that English writing in general has become less formal and more like speech. In this book, Kress explains how the de-emphasis on writing and the emphasis on other representational modes has evolved logically with new media forms (computers, cd-rom, email, chat rooms, cell phones, handheld computers, etc.). Kress makes no value judgments about the de-emphasis of writing as text; on the contrary, he sees it as an opportunity to broaden how we view all texts (“in which the texts of high culture could be brought into conjunction with the banal texts of the everyday”) and as an inducement for rethinking how we school for literacy: “Literacy and communication curricula rethought in this fashion offer an education in which creativity in different domains and at different levels of representation is well understood, in which both creativity and difference are seen as normal and as productive” (120-21). Kress’s assumptions about literacy are backed by sound references to the practical use of language, and his theories revitalize, for me, many of the experts in our field who have remained fundamental to my ideas about language and language learning. For example, his use of the emergent writing of children to support his theories about literacy reminds me of one of my favorite literacy research books: Jerome Harste, Virginia Woodward, and Carolyn Burke’s Language Stories and Literacy Lessons (1986). Like Kress, these authors present literacy learning as a process of socialization rather than as an acquisition facilitated by instruction. They also use the literacy stories of very young children to support their argument for a holistic approach to language learning in schools, concluding “that young children are written language users and learners prior to coming to school,” and that “language and language learning are not only continuous but have self-correcting devices built into them” (xvii-xi). Kress’s multimodal approach to texts both sustains and expands their holistic approach to language learning, and his new approach to genre—“where genre does not name the text, but an aspect of the text’s organization”—and his social semiotic examination of literacy are reminiscent of Kenneth Burke’s willingness to apply rhetorical motives to such things as dress and design as well as manners and morays. “The social semiotics approach to representations and communication,” Kress states, “sees all modes as meaning-making systems. . .” (119, 123). Just as Burke attempts to move rhetoric beyond oral and written language, Kress wants to expand our notion of literacy beyond alphabetic representation. The shift from an alphabetic literacy to a multimodal literacy, Kress says, will facilitate several changes in how we school for literacy. A literacy concerned with several different modes of representation rather than one does not lend itself easily to “competence in use,” which is traditional, “oriented to the past” (169). On the other hand, a multimodal literacy supports design, which “is prospective, future-oriented” and “starts from the interest and the intent of the designer” (169). Literacy as design allows for more creativity, too, since design of multimodal texts allows the maker of signs much more latitude in construction of texts. And unlike traditional forms of written text, where knowledge is dictated to the reader by the writer’s organization, multimodal texts offer readers the chance to organize the material in whatever way they want. Finally, it allows teachers to move beyond more formalistic approaches to literacy instruction, since as Kress puts it, “it demands that we engage with the young on the grounds of their experience. . .” (175). In my own writing classroom, I can envision using Kress’s ideas about literacy to show my students how to reflect on the differences between textbooks of the past and the ones they are using in their classes today (something Kress does in his book). In my literature survey classes I could incorporate the analysis of web pages, multimedia art, newspapers, magazines, and other multimodal texts into my syllabus alongside more traditional literary texts. And in my graduate-level professional writing courses I can imagine students working together to create and critique their own critical, creative, creative non-fiction, or technical multimodal texts. Literacy in the New Media Age has much to offer our field. In his final chapter, “Some Items for an Agenda of Further Thinking,” Kress proffers provocative questions about the future of literacy, suggesting new opportunities for research in composition studies. This book offers composition specialists a new way of looking at text, mode, genre, and media, and as a result it presents new approaches to composition for writers (designers) and readers. Pittsburg, KS Work Cited Harste, Jerome C., Virginia A.Woodward, and Carolyn L. Burke. Language Stories and Literacy Lessons. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1984.