Development of a new literacy

Development of a New Literacy

Benjamin M. Compaine

M ' y topic is information technology and cultural change. Most of the em- . phasis in current discussions of this kind is on technology itself. We

are beginning to hear talk about the economics of the technology, which is a step in the right direction. What we must think about here, however, is the cultural acceptance of technology.

I believe it was Casey Stengel who once said: "Prediction is a hazardous occupation, especially when it deals with the future." Although what I shall say may sound like prediction, I would prefer to categorize it as informed speculation. In other words, I am not claiming that what I foresee will actually happen; I am only musing about some developments that might happen.

A quip in a recent computer magazine posed the question: "You're not stupid . . . so how come your 10-year-old understands computers and you don' t?" One of the phenomena we are witnessing today is a genuine generation gap between people who have a high regard for books and the kids who play video games and take to computers - -somewhat the way kids took to automobile engines or could shoe a horse in previous generations.

These youngsters respond to computers intuitively. And the cultural changes to which I refer may not affect us so much as they will these 10- and 12-year- olds, who when they are 25 and 30 will be in the vanguard of determining how information is to be obtained and what methods will be used to manipulate it.

Literacy has never been a static concept. Over the centuries the bundle of skills we call literacy today has evolved with technology as well as with political, economic, and social systems. The current notion of literacy grew out of the technology of the quill pen, paper, movable type, and the me- chanically powered rotary press. Michael Clanchy, a scholar at the University of Glasgow specializing in medieval history, points out that in eleventh-century England, the oral record was considered the valid record. The testimony of knights at the court in Westminster was accepted before any written doc- ument. Europe was then in the era of oral literacy, and the notion of a written literacy was not yet familiar. A literate person was one who could compose and recite orally.

A scribe who posessed the skill of writing was considered a technician, not necessarily a literate person. He may not have been able to compose and recite

Benjamin M. Compaine is executive director of the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University.

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very well. It took several generations before the written record superseded the oral record. Techniques such as dating records and the use of indentures to validate records had to be developed. In the case of indentures, copies of a contract were written on the top and bottom of a sheet of parchment, which was then torn in half, with a piece going to each party. If a question arose about the validity of the contract, the parties would bring back their pieces, and if they fit together the contract was proved valid. Today we are still concerned with validation, but now the problem may involve a record on floppy disk and the question of whether in that medium the record is ac- ceptable for legal and other purposes.

The foundations of a "new literacy" will be the cultural changes generated by the increasing use of digital, electronic processes. It is important, however, to form a perspective on the nature of these changes. As historian Elizabeth Eisenstein points out in her analysis of the impact of writing on Western civilization, it may be relatively easy to describe the development of printing in the fifteenth century, but "it is another thing to decide how access to a greater abundance or variety of written records affected ways of learning, thinking, and perceiving among literate elites. "1

The long-term implications could be substantial. Along with the techno- logical alterations in how we are able to construct, store, and use information are likely to evolve parallel changees in how we approach the situations for which we seek out information.

As a hypothetical example, imagine society prior to the development of a cheap, reliable straight edge and the ball-point pen. Although the concept of a straight line may have been well known, the skill to draw a straight line free-hand would have been restricted to a relatively few skilled craftsmen. They would have been futher encumbered by the technology of the stylus and waxed tablets or reeds and papyrus as their media. Therefore, any sort of geometric problem whose solution required the use of straight lines, such as for structural designs, would have been difficult. By contrast, the widespread application of the straight edge would have broadened the base of those technically able to draw lines. The improvement of drawing implements, to quill pens, fountain pens, and ball-point pens, further reduced the difficulty in drawing lines and made their application feasible for more people.

The result is that as several technologies change, the skill level needed to perform a task declines, but the need to master the skill becomes more important because it is expected that the ability to perform the task is part of the bag of skills widely available. Moreover, and at least as important, we could assume that the widespread ability to draw accurate straight lines meant that tasks that may have been previously unthinkable--such as complex ar- chitectural renderings--became quite thinkable and doable and for a larger group of people than before.

Translated into new literacy terms, "compunications" make possible the previously hardly thinkable or unthinkable. Thus, the ability to randomly

38 Book Research Quarterly~Spring 1985

access information from a vast data base and manipulate it (whether as market research or a crossword puzzle) is not new. We can always go to a library and randomly access its stacks. But it has been highly labor intensive and has required considerable skill on the part of the searcher. The trend in computer and communicat ions use has been to lower the labor involved as well as the skill required (compare, for example, the use of the complex search routines for the bibliographic databases such as Dialog and the much simpler ones for Nexis/Lexis).

History provides a wealth of precedents for the changes we are experiencing today. Each generation tends to think its problems or opportunities are unique, whereas history often shows quite the opposite. The development of low- cost computer power and its implications for educational, industrial, social, and political structures all have antecedents.

A British librarian advised a conference of librarians in 1879:

School boys or students who took to novel reading to any great extent never made much progress in life. They neglected real practical life for essentially an imaginative one and suffered accordingly from the inno- vating influence. 2

At a 1982 conference on the future of the book, the proceedings of which appeared in the winter 1982 issue of Daedalus, a senior trade book editor made it clear that w h e n she talked about books she meant literary fiction. Whereas in 1879 the patricians of Great Britain were encouraging people to read the bible, books on how to better themselves, and other volumes that would presumably make them more productive in an industrial age, we have come 180 degrees, and today many literati believe that Jane Fonda's Workout Book, the how-to books, and Erma Bombeck's books are trash undeserving of clas- sification as books.

The word "literacy" can be used to describe a number of skills. It is used to designate the ability to read and write in one's vernacular. Being literate may mean being familiar with the great works of literature and phi losphy of a culture. Sometimes it is applied to functional skills, such as the ability to make out a bank check or unders tand simple written instructions. The term "literacy" may be used in connection with specialized skills, as w h e n a person who can identify the work of composers is said to be musically literate. The ability to unders tand calculus may qualify one to be called mathematically literate. And today the ability to write programs in Fortran or Basic may be called computer literacy.

The mastering of almost any skill can be called a literacy: mechanical literacy, visual literacy, and so on. The term "literacy" itself comes from the Latin literatus, that is, "marked with letters." In medieval usage, to be literate meant to be learned in Latin, not to have the ability to read and write in the vernacular. As with that 1879 librarian, there has long been a fear of the effects of changes in the form of literacy. Socrates told the story of Thamus, king of

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Egypt, to whom the god Theuth brought the art of writing. Thamus said, "This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves . . . but under the stimulus of external marks. ''3

The notion that writing fosters a thought process different from the verbal is an old one. Goody, Innes, McLuhan, and Ong, among others, addressing the relationship between thought processes and the technology of expression, generally believe that the development of alphabets consisting of a small number of symbols has made possible "a stage of logical thinking that is not possible in cultures with only an oral tradition. ''s Writing, particularly ana- lytical writing, has increased the explicitness of language. Ideas of cause and effect are sequential in form, establishing a relationship that some anthro- pologists, linguists, and others believe is alien to predominantly oral cultures. Even Chinese writing invests each ideogram with total intuition, which leaves little role to the visual sequence of what follows and precedes it.

The shift from oral to written literacy, with its emphasis on reading and writing skills, brought about political, social, economic, and cultural changes, few if any of which could have been foreseen by contemporaries of the printing press. I mention this fact because we become consumed by efforts to predict the social outcome of computer and other present-day technology, despite the evidence that, by and large, man has been notoriously unsuccessful at this sort of prophecy.

Contrary to some modern myths, furthermore, literacy has not led to uni- form results across all cultures. Widespread literacy cannot automatically be associated with any particular form of government or economy. Literacy has not always widened the perspectives of those who attained its skills. We have long associated literacy with the notion of higher productivity: a literate worker is a better worker. Could it be, however, that we have reversed cause and effect? Might not the most highly motivated workers be those who have the greatest incentive to learn to read and write?

Let me turn to some forces and trends shaping the new literacy. My premise is that the effects of recent electronic, digital technology in computers and communications--what we call "compunications"--are the continuation of a long, well-documented historical process. Videogames, personal computers, compunications, the increasing cost of paper and physical delivery, widespread use of automatic teller machines, electronic mail, growth in electronic database publishing, and so forth, are not isolated or mutually exclusive developments. They are pieces of a dynamic process in much the same tradition as, for example, the development of the steam-driven rotary press, the spread of the railroads, the manufacture of cheap paper, and improvements in optics for eyeglasses were. The latter forces led to a profound change in the nature and breadth of written literacy, from the elite to the masses. Now, other forces are coming together with the potential for a new set of effects.

I call your attention to the "map" of the information business. Books are


THE INFORMATION BUSINESS IROAD(~J~T NETWORKS D A T A ~ S E S AND PROFESSIONAL SVCS

GOV'[ MAIL MAILGRAM TELEPHONE VAN's BqOADCkST STATIOt~6 VIDEOTEX PARCEL SVCS E-CO~ TELEGRApH C-.4M~E NET'WORKS NEWS SVCS F INANCIAL SVCS COURIER SVCS Ekes OCC'I CABLE O4~ENATORS TELE3"EXT ADVERTISqN4~ SVCS OTHER DELtYIERY IRC'I

SVCS M U L T I ~ I N T DISTRIBUTION SV~.S DIGITAL TERMINATION SVCS SATELLITE SVC.S TIME SHARING SERVICE BURF.AUS

PRINTIN~ COS FM S U ~ A R R f E R 5 BILLING AND ON-LINE DIRECTORIES

LIBRARIES MOBILE SVCS METERIN~I SVCS SOFTWARE SVCS

PAGING SVCS MULTIPLEXING SVCS SYNDICATORS AND

PROGRAM PACKAGERS

LO<3SE~PF SVCS RETAILIFRS NEWSSTANDS

INDUSTRY ~ S

DEFENS4E TELEC..~M SYSTEMS

S4ECURIT~f SVCS

CO~IPIJTERS

PABX'i

RADIOS TV SETS TELEPHONE SWITCHING EQUIP

PRINTING AND TELEPHONES MOOEMS C, INJ~H IC~ EOUIP TERMINALS CONCENTRATORS

COPIERS PRINTERS I~JL T IPI.EXERS FACSIMILE ATlerl

CASH REGISTERS POS E(~JIP ~OAC"?,J~ST AND

INSTRUMENTS TRANSMISSION EQUIP CALCULATORS

T~PIEW~ITERS WORD PROCESSORS DICTA T IDOl EO4JIP FILE CABINETS ~ O S , VIDEO DISC PLAYERS

BLANK TAPE VID4EO TAPE RECORD4ERS AND F ILM MICROFILM MICROFICHE MASS ST O~AO4E

PAPER B;JS]NE~S FORMS OR~ ETIN(3 CJM~ D~

SOf'T~/AR E PACKAGES

DIRECTORIES NEWSPAPERS

NEW~LETTERS

MAGAZINES

SHOPPERS

AUDIO RECORDS AND TAPES

FILMS AND VIDEO PROGRAMS

BOOKS

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I FO~RM S U B S T A N C E N

represented in the lower right-hand corner of the map. At the upper right, professional services are located, representing the work of writers, photog- raphers, and others who create content. In the upper left*hand corner we find government mail, a pure delivery service totally unconcerned with content. At the bottom left is paper, which, as a pure conduit, is also not concerned with content. Arrayed in between are the other beasts you might encounter in the information jungle: the telephone, newspapers, and software packages. In the very center are computers.

The items in the corners are labor- or energy-intensive and are increasing most rapidly in cost. They are also the oldest components of the business, the items Ben Franklin would recognize. (it is no coincidence that Ben Franklin was a writer, publisher, printer, and the postmaster general of the co lonies- - in fact, the ultimate conglomerate.) The items in the center are declining in cost. They are driven by semiconductor technology or are enjoying certain economies, such as those offered by satellite communications.

Bleached pulp, a basic ingredient of the paper used in books, periodicals, and newsprint, as well as first-class postage and wages, have all been increasing at rates of 100-200(/, since 1970. At the same time, the cost of computer memory, and of computer calculations, has been dropping about 25% a year. Hand-held calculators are now so cheap that they are displayed at the

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checkout counters of discount drug stores and may soon be found as prizes in Crackerjacks boxes. It has been said that if the price of a Rolls-Royce had declined and its efficiency had increased at the same rate as that of computer storage, a Rolls-Royce today would sell for $2.50 and get two million miles to the gallon!

We see these facts illustrated in the growth of certain information industries. Computer software and cable television are among the top three in revenue growth since 1970, whereas paper manufacturing, periodical publishing, and book and newspaper publishing are toward the bottom of the list. The implications for publishers are clear.

Intellectual capital will still have to be created in the future, and those who create it will have to be compensated in some way. This is why we shall continue to need editors and publishers. There is a tendency, however , to move away from the corners and toward the center of the information map. This will obviously not happen overnight, nor at the same rate for all kinds of information, nor in all market areas. The pace at which these cultural changes will occur is difficult to estimate. But the notion that there is some- thing special about the book--or about print--is , 1 believe, culturally derived, and therefore subject to change.

We have become used to and comfortable with print; we have developed conventions for its use. But essentially print is a format, just as video is; and formats exist to enable users to display and manipulate content or substance. Words can be expressed in speech as well as in writing, and writing can take the forms of carvings in stone, toe marks in the sand, ink on paper, or glowing phosphors on a video screen. These are among a mult i tude of ways in which we can express substance. And substance, in turn, may consist of data, knowledge, news, intelligence, and other colloquial and specialized notations that can be lumped together under the general heading of information.

Process, on the other hand, is the application of i n s t rumen t s - such as type- writers, computers, printing presses, the human brain, te lephone wires, or delivery t r u c k s - i n the creation, manipulation, storage, and transmission of substance in intermediate or final format. For example, a traditional newspaper utilizing an ink-and-newsprint format relies on processes that enter the thoughts of a reporter into a computer by manipulat ing a keyboard with a video display terminal. Eventually the stored data create a printing plate, and the finished product is distributed to consumers on trucks. Portions of the process would remain unchanged even if the material were distributed to some consumers over telephone links to video display terminals.

The message of the new literacy notion is that changing processes and formats may have a long-term effect on how users deal with substance. A generation of children is being exposed to videogames and computers at home and school. Unlike print or even radio and television, these devices change the relationship between users and the process by which they receive information.


Unlike users of a printed book or conventional motion picture, users of digitally based substance find they can manipulate the image on the screen, change it, and often store it without necessarily leaving the footprints of penciled marginal notes or splices that have been the basis for modifying substance provided in traditional formats. The thousands of engineers and draftsmen who are using computer-aided-design terminals are in the forefront of what could be a fundamental change.

Behind this vanguard may be a generation that is starting to discover that a computer is more than a number cruncher or text manipulator. Anyone who has had access to a computer with a graphics program, such as Apple's Macintosh, quickly discovers that one no longer need be an artist to "draw." What the straight edge was to straight lines, so MacPaint may be to modern graphics. With virtually no more skill than is necessary to connect two points with a ruler today, a user of these types of programs, combined with an appropriate printer, can create diagrams and pictures, for use in correspon- dence, for business, for engineering study, for charts, or for pure art.

If the new literacy notion is correct, then over time those literate in newer (but increasingly more commonplace) compunications processes such as these are likely to internalize fresh approaches to using substance, in much the same way that increasing familiarity and comfort with written records changed how information was used when it was stored predominantly in memory and conveyed primarily orally. As the straight edge opened up the world to common use of straight lines, so may the widespread use of computers open up opportunities for lowering and expanding the skills associated with its powers for manipulating information.

Look around you and you will see the signs of the new literacy. You will see them in the workplace, in word-processing machines and terminals on executives' desks; in factories, where draftsmen are becoming computer design operators, achieving results they never could have before; in retail es- tablishments, with point-of-sale terminals and small computers for processing inventory data; in leisure and creative activities; and, increasingly, in education.

The potential is particularly great in offices. I have heard it said that every farm worker is backed by $52,000 in capital, every industrial worker by perhaps $37,000--and every office worker by a typewriter and a bunch of paper clips! The incentive to make office workers more productive by backing them with additional capital investment is substantial. Other typical growth areas are exemplified by ATMs (automatic teller machines) in banks, and EFTs (electronic funds transfer devices) in retail stores. A youngster working in a McDonald's doesn't have to know the price of a Big Mac to ring up a sale; he needs merely to push a button adjoining the picture of a Big Mac and another button to enter the money he has been handed, and the machine will automatically record the transaction and figure out how much change is due the customer.

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The electronic games business may have peaked in 1982; however, we should not be misled by predictions about the demise of these games. Elec- tronic games have become blurred with inexpensive home computers on which they are now being played and where they are becoming so popular that people are not patronizing arcades as much as they used to. The U.S. Army is even utilizing Radio Shack computers for videogames that teach recruits who cannot read very well how to operate tanks and other equipment.

For the past six years, we have analyzed want ads for secretarial jobs in the New York Times to discover what skills are being required in the workplace. In 1977 not a single secretarial ad mentioned word processing, and "mag card machine operator" was a separate want ad category. By 1983, 18% of secretarial ads required competence in computer-based word processing or an equivalent skill. The number of video display terminals available in offices is increasing rapidly. We estimate that 15 million adults use VDT's as part of their everyday work. These are not computer-literate people. They include order and reser- vation takers and other clerks using computer-based information systems.

Aetna Life and Casualty Company estimates that by 1985 it will make one VDT available for every two employees. IBM has informed us that except for their production workers they expect to have more than one VDT per em- ployee in 1985. Many of the people involved will have two or more VDTs in their offices because they will have to access several computer systems that are incompatible with each other.

At what stage of new literacy development do we find ourselves? James Squire commented on the fact that in education today computers are being used merely to mimick workbooks. That's very natural. When television first became popular in the late forties, Fred Allen, who had been a major comedy star on radio, did not succeed in the new medium. Another veteran comedian, Milton Berle, on the other hand, became such a hit that he has been called the father of television. Unlike Allen, who could not adapt himself to the visual medium, Berle learned how to use it to best advantage.

Some early shows on television merely repeated routines from radio and phonograph records. There is a learning curve for people who establish any new venture. Nor can we fully anticipate how the new technologies will ultimately be utilized. It will take today's 12-year-olds to break the mold, to produce materials that do not merely automate the content of our book and print technology--not that there isn't a lot of value in automating it. Anyone who has used a word processor knows that there is a great deal of use in such automation. The fact is, however, that we still produce printouts on paper in that process, and we still take a red pen and make changes on that printout and only then do we or our secretaries make the changes on the word processor. We are at a very intermediate stage, still pouring old wine into new bottles.

Another fact we have to recognize is that different types of information lend themselves to different uses. Surveillance information is information peo-


pie know they want, such as a baseball score or a flight schedule. Such information obviously lends itself to some sort of electronic storage and retrieval. A less likely candidate for electronic storage, at least in the immediate future, is social connection information. That is information that people do not necessarily know they want until they encounter it. Included here are the serendipitous occasions that arise from a person's turning the pages of a newspaper or browsing in a bookstore. Opinion formation information in- volves knowledge required for decision making, such as whom to vote for, or what to look for when buying a refrigerator. That sort of information can normally be supplied by an electronic retrieval system. The fourth type is escape, or entertainment. Entertainment may well be electronic, as in videogames, not to mention conventional television. But there are other forms, such as crossword puzzles and comics.

Information often moves from one category to another. A magazine I wish I had more time to read is the Economist. I sometimes browse through it; and occasionally I read an article for social connection purposes, because it catches my eye, or because I feel I ought to know about its content. But I cannot possibly read most of the magaz ine- -or most other publications, for that matter. However , a week, a month , or a year later I might be doing some research and going to our Nexus terminal, which as you know, accesses the full text of the Economist and many other sources. I ask the system a question, which, incidentally, I could not have asked two or three years ago because it would have taken a research assistant three weeks to locate the source, whereas now it takes 10 minutes. And it may develop that my question will be an- swered by an article or reference from the Economist. I may have noticed the article when I first received the issue, or I may have missed it, but in any case I did not know at the time that I needed it. Now it has become surveillance information for me, because I want that specific item.

We have developed a research agenda for the new literacy, the pursuit of which is my current mission. Our agenda takes us clearly beyond such narrow questions as whether all children should have access to microcomputers or need to learn programming. I suspect that the computer won ' t become a mass commodi ty until it stops looking like a computer. It is the computer in your automobile engine and in your telephone system that demonstrates real power, not a device labeled computer with a disk drive attached.

The issues on our research agenda may not as yet be subjects for debate, but mistakes respecting those issues will be costly and their outcome important. The agenda can be summarized as follows:

�9 What are the underpinnings of traditional literacy and what is their relationship to current dominant technology, that is, print?

�9 What are the elements of newer information technologies that may shape future information processing?

�9 What is the correlation, if any, between available technology and the

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substance-- that is, the conten t - -which is gathered, created, stored, and transmitted to seekers and users of information?

�9 What are the nontechnological factors that facilitate society's acceptance of elements of a literacy?

�9 What bundle of skills may make up a new literacy, and how, if at all, will they complement or supplement the traditional bundle of literacy skills?

These and similiar general questions and issues will form the basis for investigations of the new literacy and for specific policy issues in education, the workplace, the home, and the legal system in Western and other societies.

If all I have said leaves you confused, angry, or at least excited, let me bring you down to earth with the story of the old rabbi who was lying on his deathbed. The elders of the village, who were gathered around, asked him, "Rabbi, before you die, give us a final word of wisdom." And the rabbi, with great effort, raised himself up and said, "The world is like a barrel."

On hearing this, the elders nodded and said, "Yes, yes, the world is like a barrel. That makes sense." And the word spread through the house until it reached the rabbi's wife. But the old woman scratched her head and said, "What does he mean, 'The world is like a barrel'? That doesn ' t make any sense!" So the word went back to the elders who whispered to one another and finally asked the rabbi, "What do you mean, the world is like a barrel"? With his last ounce of strength the Rabbi raised himself up again and said, "So, maybe it's not like a barrel."

Notes

1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as An Agent of Change (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 8.

2. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 233.

3. W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz, trans., Plato's Phaedrus (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 68.

4. Daniel P. Resnick, "Spreading the Word: An Introduction," Literacy In Historical Perspective (Washington: Library of Congress, 1983), p. 3.

Comments:

Judith Appelbaum:

From Mr. Compaine 's presentation, I am willing to assume that a new literacy is indeed evolving. Accordingly, I would like to raise some questions about the role of book publishers in the new world that seems to be emerging.

Judith Appelbaum is co-author of How to Get Happily Published, and book review editor of BRQ.


Many book publishers have become producers and distributors of new technology products such as online information services and software. Why? Book publishers did not, after all, become producers and distributors of materials for radio, television, or the movies, which are much closer to print and more linear and sequential in character than the technologies now evolving.

When radio, television, and the movies came along, book publishers decided that these were very different businesses, that publishers did not know anything about such ventures, and that therefore they should license their products to people in these other businesses rather than attempt to produce unfamiliar materials themselves.

Why, I wonder, have publishers made such a different decision on this occasion? Why have they entered such a very different business? ls it because words on a page and words on a screen look so similiar or because we are passing through an old-wine-in-new-bottles period? If those are the reasons, then what will happen at the next stage, when the new technologies are used in ways that break the mold, when the wine becomes new? Will book publishers be able to cope with that?

If, on the other hand, book publishers have become involved because of encouragement from high-tech people, an even more serious question arises. From recent conversations with software producers outside the book field, I gather they believe that book publishers should be involved because they have such a wonderful distribution system and that software should be dis- seminated through that system because it is so well organized and works so well.

As any of us who observe book publishing know, that perception is not universally shared by the industry. The book publishing distribution system is so chaotic that it is almost impossible to graph. Lines crisscross and curl around each other in a manner designed to drive a graphic artist crazy. Why, then, do software producers outside the industry think the system is so ter- rific? And is it a good thing that they think so?

Furthermore, are book publishers the sort of people likely to adapt well to radically different modes of thought, to be at home with rapidly changing processes and products? I certainly don't know the answer to that question, but I shall share a small anecdote that may point to an answer.

A candidate for a master's degree at Boston University School of Publication has been studying the role of issues management in the book publishing industry. (Issues management monitors the business environment for developments of potential significance. It attempts to detect trends before they germinate into issues, that is, conditions or pressures that will affect the functioning of the organization or its future goals and interests. If an enterprise can develop plans to minimize problems or to take advantage of opportunities before they arise, the organization will stand a better chance of dealing suc- cessfully with coming changes. Issue management techniques are, of course, standard procedure in many companies and in many industries.)

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What our BU master 's candidate found to her horror when she began ques- tioning book publishers was that most of them did not monitor the environment with a view toward spotting developing trends so that they could take advantage of forthcoming opportunities or head off incipient problems. Fur- thermore, they told her, they didn' t see any point in doing so.

Now, I cannot say positively that this researcher's experience reflects the general reality, but I cannot help wonder ing whether it does. And if it does, I wonder whether book publishers are really the right sort of people to function as intermediaries between creators and consumers of the dynamic, flexible materials geared to stimulate the holistic, intuitive thinking that is in the offing. Instead, should publishers not be doing more of what they have been doing and let others act as intermedaries in that process?

Moreover, even if a new literacy does evolve, the book may remain the best med ium for certain uses, and print on paper may perform certain functions better than any other medium. Just as, even after television came along, certain broadcasts continued to work best on radio. If, as I and some other contributors to this discussion believe, the book will remain the medium of choice for many applications, would it not pay book publishers to begin focusing firmly on what those uses might be? And should they not devote their energies to mining those areas rather than territories alien to their business and, perhaps, alien to the way they think and function?

Mark Carroll:

At a recent meeting at the Library of Congress, John Chancellor, who is a member of the advisory committee for the Center for the Book's study on the future of the book, observed that when papyrus, a marvelous development , replaced clay tablets as a writing medium, someone must surely have organized a conference on the future of the clay tablet in the age of papyrus.

Some 18 years ago in Turkey, I encountered a book published by Columbia University Press, dealing with the introduction of printing into Turkey in the late fifteenth century. From this volume I learned that when this event oc- curred, the wise pashas decided that they could not possibly prohibit so remarkable an invention, and so permission was given for its importation. But the Turkish scribes were unhappy, perceiving the printing press as a threat to their livelihood. After much turmoil and discussion the wise pashas ruled that the press could indeed be established, but only for secular printing. The scribes would continue copying largely religious material. Thus, the new and the old techniques would happily coexist.

I believe that is what we are talking about here: the coexistence of new media and old, of clay tablets and papyrus, of the printed word and its

Mark Carroll is chief of professional publications at the United States National Park Service.


electronic packaging and storage, and of the reformulation and repositioning of the processes of information creation, information transfer, and information use. In essence, we are asking both what future we foresee for the book and how we define the book in the first place. Even though we may agree on definitions, how can we agree on what to agree on? And whom - -and how-- are we going to train for this brave new world?

I certainly subscribe to Mr. Compaine's view that we need to define the new literacy before we can move to where we believe we are going. The librarian of Congress, after hearing the word "literacy" used in a number of contexts, has grumbled about "computer literacy," "tennis literacy," and sim- ilar descriptive terms that, he says, do not acknowledge that "literacy" means "the ability to read and write." Mr. Compaine's definition of the word comes from another part of the accepted meaning, namely "marked with letters."

But this definition goes well beyond that spacial and graphical representation, since he is dealing with nonlinear, multifaceted representation in time and space. Thus, his new literacy might be expanded into what might be called the "new perception," incorporating both linear and nonlinear inter- actions embedded in the new bundle of skills. This new perception requires the ability not only to thread letters into words that constitute sequences or messages, but also to manipulate or correlate those messages with, perhaps, the addition of numbers or other abstract indicators in patterns that amplify their meaning and significance. My purchase of a copy of the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout counter, when recorded on the scanner, has enormous implications when multiplied, manipulated, massaged, and inte- grated with other data--implications for editorial, advertising, newsprint pur- chasing, and other applications.

I submit that dealing with these data is more than literacy. I further submit that we are contending not with the future but with many futures. Technical and cultural changes alter the prevailing modes, customs, and procedures but do not eradicate superseded routines. Metal type is still being cast and used. Calligraphy flourishes, thanks in part to offset printing. Specialist and celebrity lectures before live audiences continue as a viable platform. And stock traders at the American Stock Exchange, in spite of computerized quotations and electronic real-time displays, still do their trading, as they have for a century, by means of a modified version of the American sign language for the deaf.

There is a body of evidence to support the contention that there are multiple components to literacy and that these components have changed with technology and vary among cultures. Thus, we shall assimilate the new literacy into our new perception, selecting from an expanding menu the sustenances we require to nourish our professional and personal needs. With seers and synthesizers like Ben Compaine to help us sort things out, we shall, to echo Sol Liebowitz, avoid opening a Pandora's box--and letting out a Trojan horse.

Documents

Development of a new literacy