Deputy Director and Head, Washington Office
Richard A. Lanham

from Scientific American, Sept. 1995

The word literacy, meaning the ability to read and write, has gradually extended its grasp in the digital age until it has come to mean the ability to understand information, however presented. Increasingly, information is being offered in a new way: instead of black letters printed on a white page, the new format blends words with recorded sounds and images into a rich and volatile mixture. The ingredients of this combination, which has come to be called multimedia, are not new, but the recipe is. New, too, is the mixture's intrinsic volatility. Print captures utterance: the words are frozen on the page. This fixity confers authority and sometimes even timeless immortality. That is why we revalue it, want to get things down in `black-and-white', write a sonnet, in Horace's words, `more lasting than bronze.' The multimedia signal puts utterance back into time: the reader can change it, reformat and rescale it, transform the images, sounds and words. And yet, at the end of these elegant variations, the original can be summoned back with a keystroke. Print literacy aimed to pin down information; multimedia literacy couples fixity and novelty in a fertile oscillation. Contrary to the proverbial wisdom, in a digital universe you can eat your cake and have it, too: keep your original and digest it on your own terms. And because digital code is replicable without material cost, you can give your cake away as well. Printed books created the modern idea of `intellectual property' because they were fixed in form and difficult to replicate. One could therefore sell and own them, and the livelihoods of printer and author could be sustained. This copyright structure dissolves when we introduce the changeable multimedia signal. We will have to invent another scaffolding to fit the new literacy. Judging from the early signs, it won't be easy.

There is one other way in which digital flexibility is radical. If we ask, looking through the wide-angle lens of Western cultural history, What does multimedia literacy do?, a surprisingly focused answer comes back. It recaptures the expressivity of oral cultures, which printed books and hand-written manuscripts before them excluded.

In writing this text, for example, I have been trying to create a credible `speaking voice' to convince you that I am a person of sense and restraint. Now imagine that you can `click on an author box'. I appear as a moving image, walk into the margin and start to speak, commenting on my own argument, elaborating it, underlining it with my voice, gesture and dress, as can happen nowadays in a multimedia text.

What has changed? Many of the clues we use in the oral culture of daily life, the intuitive stylistic judgements that we depend on, have returned. You can see me for yourself. You can hear my voice. You can feed that voice back into the voiceless prose and thus animate it. Yet the writing remains as well. You can see the author with stereoscopic depth, speaking in a space that is both literate and oral.

Oral cultures and literate cultures go by very different sets of rules. They observe different senses of time, as you will readily understand if you listen to one of Fidel Castro's four-hour-long speeches. Oral cultures prolong discourse because, without it, they cease to be; they exist only in time. But writing compresses time. An author crams years of work into some 300 pages that the reader may experience in a single day.

Oral and literate cultures create different senses of self and society, too. The private reflective self created by reading differs profoundly from the un-selfconscious social role played by participants in a culture that knows no writing. Literacy allows us to see human society in formal terms that are denied to an oral culture that only plays out its drama.

The oral and written ways of being in the world have contended rancorously throughout Western history, the rancour being driven more often than not by literate prejudice against the oral rules. Now the great gulf in communication and in cultural organisation that was opened up by unchanging letters on a static surface promises to be healed by a new kind of literacy, one that orchestrates these differences in a signal at the same time more energising and more irenic than the literacy of print.

If we exchange our wide-angle cultural lens for a close-up, we can observe the fundamental difference between the two kinds of literacies. In the world of print, the idea and its expression are virtually one. The meaning takes the form of words; words generate the meaning. Digital literacy works in an inherently different way. The same digital code that expresses words and numbers can, if the parameters of expression are adjusted, generate sounds and images. This parametric variation stands at the centre of digital expressivity, a role it could never play in print.

The multiple facets of this digital signal constitute the core difference between the two media, which our efforts in data visualisation and sonification have scarcely begun to explore. If we think of the institutional practices built on the separation of words, image and sound, such as separate departments for literature, art and music, we can glimpse the profound changes that will come when we put them back together.

To be deeply literate in the digital world means being skilled at deciphering complex images and sounds as well as the syntactical subtleties of words. Above all, it means being at home in a shifting mixture of words, images and sounds. Multimedia literacy makes us all skilled opera-goers: it requires that we be very quick on our feet in moving from one kind of medium to another. We must know what kinds of expression fit what kinds of knowledge and become skilled at presenting our information in the medium that our audience will find easiest to understand.

We all know people who learn well from books and others who learn by hands-on experience; others, as we say in music, `learn by ear.' Digital literacy greatly enhanced our ability to suit the medium both to the information being offered and to the audience. Looked at one way, this new sensory targeting makes communication more efficient. Looked at another, it simply makes it more fun.

The multimedia mixture of talents was last advanced as an aristocratic ideal by the Renaissance humanists. The courtly lord and lady were equally accomplished in poetry, music and art. The Renaissance ideal now presents itself, broadened in scope and perhaps coarsened in fibre, as the common core of citizenship in an information society. At its heart, the new digital literacy is thus profoundly democratic. It insists that the rich mixture of perceptive talents once thought to distinguish a ruling aristocracy must now be extended to everyone. It thus embodies fully the inevitable failures, and the extravagant hope, of democracy itself.

RICHARD A. LANHAM is the author of several books on literary criticism and prose stylistics. His latest, The Electronic Word, was published simultaneously on paper and laser disc. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of Rhetorica, Inc., a media production company.