GIPHY National Geographic Channel

The use of all our senses to process information is vital for our survival. We need our capacity to see, taste, smell, touch, and hear to be able to respond adequately to what happens around us. The way we use this ability is subject to change as we continuously have to adapt to the requirements of new technologies. In prehistoric times, survival was dependent on the capacity to see and hear dangers and to remember rich hunting places. Through drawings, this knowledge could be shared with a community (Groeneveld, 2016). Traces of this practice, the very first ‘modes of communication’, can be found in prehistoric sites, like the caves of Lascaux in France (Unesco, World Heritage List, 1979). The move from an oral to a written culture released humans from the strong dependency on memory, creating a new platform for more abstract thoughts and reasoning that could relate to differences in time and space (Ong, 2002 )

The Rise of a Reading and Writing Culture

In ancient Greece writing challenged an elite that relied heavily on the memorization of literature and history. The philosopher Plato (c. 428 – 347 B.C.E.) is said to have seen writing as a threat to man's intellectual capacity to process and retain information (Frentz, 2006). In his book Phaedrus (Project Gutenberg, 2008) he wrote about the deceitful nature of written text. His fears were, however, unfounded, as well into the Middle Ages- when writing systems had been well integrated in centres of knowledge and power- oral cultures of communication prevailed. Since the level of literacy was low, public readings were common (Manguel, 1996). According to Walter Ong this continued to be the case even after the introduction of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century. The shift from oral collective practices of knowledge transfer to solitary practices of silent reading, only came about after standard rules for the structure of texts were established. The effects of greater legibility were decisive for the increase in literacy (Ong, 2002; Robertson, 2012).

Education, Speed, and Scale

The introduction of state-organised education in 18th century Europe led to a dramatic increase of literacy (Gellner, 1983; Pearson and Young, 2002). The innovations in communication and transport technology, such as the telegraph, the camera, and the steam engine in the 19th century, meant a parallel increase of the speed and scale at which information could be spread. The rise of mass media in the 20th century not only turned literate citizens into potential consumers of news and entertainment (Vincent, 2000; Baran, 2019), but also paved the way for the later shift from textual to multimodal literacy. With the introduction of film, radio, telephone, television and recording technologies that were able to ‘capture’ and spread these type of signals, oral and visual modes of communication gained traction again. The costs of these technologies, however, set limits to the scale at which they could be used to create content and share it. This barrier was lifted with the advent of digital technology and the introduction of the world wide web. These created an information culture that gave unlimited access to ways of producing, sharing and consuming information at a very low cost on an unprecedented scale. Progress in web technology gradually turned a system for text-based web-content created in the 1990s, into an all pervasive structure that offers access to multimodal content at no cost, with which we are structurally connected. The predominance of modalities such as sound, speech, photo and film calls for expanding our definition of ‘literacy’ (Wegerif, 2015). We may need to revive skills from our early childhood, when we were completely reliant on our ability to imitate what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears. We forget that the very first time that we write down an alphabetic character, we are actually creating or interpreting an image. Understanding the differences and similarities between still images, moving images, sound and text, and being able to critically appraise how we create meaning out of them, requires some basic knowledge of how our senses work and interact in our brain (Kress, 2010).

References

• Baran, S. J. (2021). Introduction to Mass Communication (11th edition). McGraw-Hill Education.
• Groeneveld, E. (2016, December 9). Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Societies. Https://Www.Worldhistory.Org. https://www.worldhistory.org/user/emmagroeneveld1/
• Frentz, T. S. (2006). Memory, Myth, and Rhetoric in Plato’s “Phaedrus.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 36, 243–262. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886313
• Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism (ed.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Kress, G. R. (2010). Multimodality : a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication.
• Manguel, A. (1996). A History of Reading(New York; Viking, 1996). New York, Viking Penguin. https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/9634
• Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and Literacy (2nd ed.). Routledge New York. https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf
• Pearson, G., Young, A. T., & National Academy of Engineering; National Research Council; Committee on Technological Literacy; (Eds.). (2002). Technically Speaking Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10250
• Robertson, C. (2012, October 28). The Origins of Silent Reading and its Impact on Education. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept10/2010/10/30/printing-press-and-its-impact-on-literacy/
• Unesco World Heritage List. (1979). Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley. Http://Whc.Unesco.Org/En/List/85-011. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/85-011
• Vincent, D. (2000). The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. John Wiley & Sons.
• Wegerif, R, Technology and teaching thinking: Why a dialogic approach is needed for the twenty-first century, in: Wegerif, R., Li, L., & Kaufman, J. C. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Teaching Thinking (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315797021