Language and its manifestations

Language is a social and cognitive system that helps us create and express meanings. It is an ‘open’ system that accommodates variation and change at societal levels as well as idiosyncratic invention at the level of the individual. Consequently, language is not just a system, but also an adaptive human practice. And it is a practice that often involves material dimensions. While language operates in hidden and silent ways in our heads, it is observable when we speak, sign, or write. The particular ways we choose to actualize or materialize language in speech, signing, or writing will depend on many factors, such as our repertoire of words and structures, our purpose, our assessment of the setting, our interlocutor or audience and the social roles and expectations that are associated with them, our knowledge of discourse and genre conventions, and the particular ways our interlocutors are using language with us and around us in a particular context. In the case of writing, how (and how much) we write will also depend on what material resources we have available to us. We make choices about wording and about what to say and what not to say based on our past experience, but each new communicative situation we face will always be a little different from situations we have encountered in the past, so creative adaptation is a perennial necessity.

Language is often talked about as a code that allows people to communicate by signs that have commonly agreed-upon meanings. Computers also rely on codes for all aspects of their functioning. The common reference to code in both human and computer contexts can be misleading, for it reinforces a popular idea that human communication is a process of transferring information from one person to another. Since much of this book concerns computer technology and communication, it is important from the outset to clarify that communication between humans happens very differently from that within and between machines.

The fact that experience and linguistic repertoire will inevitably vary across individuals means that communication cannot be a matter of transmitting ‘the same’ meaning from one person to another. Human communication is more a matter of elaborating, monitoring, and negotiating meanings in ongoing dialogue with others, producing a kind of communal working draft that can always be revisited as needed, but left alone as long as it produces mutually acceptable results to the participants. As we produce discourse in collaboration with real or imagined others, we often assimilate further resources into our linguistic and discursive repertoire, but none of us possesses anywhere near all the possible resources. Moreover, language never signifies on its own. It always signifies in relation to the specific contexts in which it is generated and interpreted. Like money, which has only potential value until it is realized in the context of a commercial transaction, language's meaning potential is only actualized in contexts of use, whether in thought, speech, gesture, or writing.

Although we internalize language and frequently use it as a silent, personal resource for thinking, language is primordially a social phenomenon, and we first experience language in the world around us in audible or visible forms. Language therefore requires some kind of medium and an accompanying technology of use. In the case of speech, the medium is sound waves moving through air, and the technology is the collection of processes involved in articulating, hearing, and interpreting sounds. In sign language, bodies, space, and light constitute the medium, which requires an embodied technology of producing, perceiving, and parsing gestures. In writing, the medium is a surface or space, and the technology involves the use of material tools to inscribe and interpret graphic signs.

In an era in which technology allows us to instantly transform speech into text, text into speech, and even brainwaves into speech or text (Low & Hawking, Reference Low and Hawking2012), forms of communication are more protean than ever. Trying to locate the original source, the essential ‘it’ of language is an elusive pursuit, as meaning resources are widely distributed, both inside and outside people's heads.

The multiform materiality of language raises the fundamental problem of what relative status to attribute to each form. Language is often thought of as primarily spoken and only secondarily written. And hearing people may only think of signed language if reminded. This is perhaps due to the relative youth of writing and sign language, which go back five millennia and five centuries respectively, whereas speech presumably dates back hundreds of thousands of years. Moreover, while every society uses speech, not all use writing. And within societies that do use writing, not everyone learns to write, because writing requires conscious learning in ways that speech does not, and literacy is sometimes reserved for only certain social classes. Finally, although we may talk to ourselves and to our pets, we most often speak when other people are present. Writing, on the other hand, typically occurs when people are absent from one another, perhaps making writing seem less integral to human life.Footnote ⁴

Indeed, from Plato and Aristotle through Rousseau, Saussure, Vygotsky, Jakobson, Bloomfield, and Steven Pinker today, the dominant assumption has been that writing is simply a representation of speech in a physically preservable medium. As Aristotle put it, “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words” (Aristotle, Reference Aristotle and Hedghill2001, p. 1). In this view, written words are signs of signs, twice removed from the things they represent. “Writing is not language,” Leonard Bloomfield went so far as to say, “but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks” (Bloomfield, Reference Bloomfield1933, p. 21) akin to the use of a phonograph (ibid., p. 282). This predominant perspective is also reflected in the definition of writing proposed in the highly authoritative volume The World's Writing Systems:

One problem with this writing-as-notation-of-speech view is that it implies that linguistic innovation and change occur only in speech (and are only subsequently recorded in writing), that writing never influences speech, and that the meaning-making resources of writing are subsumed by those of speech. Even a moment's reflection shows that such notions do not hold true. Centuries of literary expression and experimentation would not be possible if writing were limited to the representation of speech. To cite just a few examples, consider Apollinaire's Calligrammes, or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, or Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or the creative forms used in online communication today – all of which innovate through resources specific to writing. Now, it may be true that few such written innovations lead to systematic change in spoken language, but that is not to say that writing does not influence speech. Putting aside the question of whether innovation has to influence the entire linguistic system in order to be considered significant, consider how pronunciations of words such as falcon, figure, golf, humble, medicine, often, palm, victuals, and zoo have been influenced by their orthography, or how acronyms (like AIDS, UNESCO) enter speech only after they have appeared in writing, or how formal spoken presentations often include syntactic structures normally used in writing. Most recently, internet written expressions like LOL, BTW, BRB, and <3 have found their way into spoken use as ‘loll,’ ‘bee tee dubs,’ ‘berb,’ and ‘I less than 3 you’ (i.e., I love you).

Regarding the notion that the meaning-making resources of writing are subsumed by those of speech, Derrida, for one, argues the opposite, that “there is no linguistic sign before writing” (Reference Derrida and Spivak1976, p. 14). In his view, writing precedes speech in the sense that words are inscribed in the mind before they are uttered. Echoing Kant's notion that the representation creates the subject, not the other way around, David Olson (Reference Olson1994) argues that because every written script can be verbalized, it serves as a model for speech. That is, by affording us a way of preserving ‘what was said,’ writing creates the categories through which we become conscious of speech, making it possible for us to generate dictionaries, grammars, logics, and rhetorics. But writing does more than both model and represent speech, for not every piece of writing can be read out loud with full preservation of its meaning. Since the earliest writing in Mesopotamia, there have always been texts that have no spoken equivalent, and today we can think of many examples, such as checks, receipts, signatures, spreadsheets, lists, business cards, contracts, recipes, reports, novels, concrete poetry, graffiti, and computer programs, as well as texts that rely on graphics, illustrations, visual play, typographic or formatting conventions, or other media to complete their meaning. In such cases, writing exceeds speech. However, it is also undeniable that intonation, rhythm, pace, articulation, and physical context all contribute to the meaning of a spoken utterance – and these are features poorly represented in writing. From this perspective, speech exceeds writing. The point is that language manifests in different forms in thought, speech, gesture, and writing. Although any one of these forms can represent another, it does not mean that it is limited to representing another form. Rather, acoustic, visual, and mental manifestations of language complement one another as we make meaning. And the meanings we make will be influenced by the resources we choose to use (or that are chosen for us by their availability or by social convention).Footnote ⁵

Writing will be the principal form of language dealt with in this book, although we will always try to keep in mind its interrelationships to other manifestations of language. Because writing is not limited to linguistic uses, however, we must define writing broadly as acts of designing meaning by means of graphic forms and space. Such a definition may disturb some readers by not specifically including language, but the fact is that although most writing is linguistic, not all of it is, and no writing is ever exclusively linguistic.

Finally we must make a distinction between scripts and languages. Any given script may serve a variety of different languages (think about how many languages are written in the Roman alphabet, for example). Conversely, multiple scripts can be used to visually mediate a single language (e.g., Japanese, which is written with hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji). Writing is adapted to language by historical accident, overt political decision, or individual initiative, but in all events, its signs bear an arbitrary relation to language.Footnote ⁶ That is because writing is a technological mediation of language.

Technology

Language and technology have ancient connections. One connection is etymologically based. The word technology comes from the Greek words technê (art, craft, knowing-how) and logos (word, discourse) and originally referred to a systematic treatment of grammar. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that technology came to refer to a science of mechanical and industrial arts, which was about the transformation of raw materials into finished products.

The second connection has to do with the ways we put language to use. Technology and language have been intimately interconnected at least since the origins of writing, and arguably since the origins of language itself.Footnote ⁷ The technology of writing made language visible, which in turn made it possible for people to preserve language and to use it across distance and time. Writing also made language an object of analysis, leading to the development of metalinguistic notions of words, parts of speech, and rules, which could be codified in dictionaries and grammars. Sound technologies such as the telephone and magnetic recording allowed us to extend the human voice beyond its natural transmission distance. Film and video technologies added visual images, facial expression, body movement, sounds, and music to recorded speech.

Today, digital technologies integrate all these forms which were traditionally stored in their own distinct medium and format (paper, magnetic tape, polyester film) but now share a common underlying data structure encoded in zeros and ones, allowing unprecedented mixing and manipulation of media. Furthermore, unlike television and radio, which involve the one-way broadcasting of authorized programming from central distribution points to relatively passive audiences, internet-based technologies are notable for making all points of a network potential broadcast sources, thereby promoting the agency of individual internet users.

These changes in the material infrastructure of media, allowing rapid electronic transfer and easy editing, have been accompanied by social changes as well. Information and communication technologies have made it possible for us to make contact with people, images, ideas, and information from around the world faster and more cheaply than ever before. They provide the platform for new kinds of social encounters, new kinds of communities, and new kinds of learning environments that do not require bodily presence in a classroom. Corresponding to these new ways of relating to one another are new forms and uses of language that may lead us to rethink what we mean by writing.

Design, transformation, and mediation are three key processes of technology that will be elaborated in Chapters 1 and 2. We have seen that design is the creative process (and product) of transforming existing resources into new ones, in relation to particular needs, purposes, and contexts.

The kinds of transformations that we will be concerned with here are not so much those of converting raw materials into finished products, but rather the reworkings, reframings, and recontextualizations of symbolic resources having to do with language, communication, and identity. This may mean moving between modes of expression, such as from speech to writing or audio-visual presentation, or between languages, as in translation, but it also has to do with the transformations of signs, whether it is movement between iconic and phonetic representation in writing, or the movement from the zeros and ones of a computer storage system to what we experience as writing, sound, music, graphics, video, and so forth.

Mediation has to do with the ways that design is affected by ‘things in the middle.’ It might be the influence that a material medium (such as clay, stone, palm leaf, or smartphone) has on the ways that written signs are shaped and produced. It might be the way that language structures our attention and thinking. Or it might be the ways that physical environments, cultural contexts, social role relations, and activity frames affect how people communicate. Although we may think especially of writing and computer-based communication as mediated, face-to-face communication is also mediated on several levels. There is the ‘hardware’ level of our bodies (brains, nerves, eyes, ears, mouths, hands, and so on) and the ‘software’ level of conventional, culturally based codes, both linguistic and non-linguistic. And, as mentioned earlier, air, light, and sound waves are essential mediational elements. So mediation involves both natural and cultural forms of support.

We don't usually think of face-to-face communication as having anything to do with technology because there is no overt ‘device’ involved. Even writing (say with the devices of pen and paper), does not seem very technological. That is because the more a technology is used, the more naturalized it becomes. “The most profound technologies are those that disappear,” writes computer scientist Mark Weiser. “They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (Weiser, Reference Weiser1991, p. 66). Writing with computers is viewed as impossibly technological to some, and utterly non-technological to others. As one undergraduate put it, “It's only technology if it happened after you were born” (Lewin, Reference Lewin2012).

Technology is a moving target. Computer systems, applications, input devices are not only continually upgraded, but also the uses to which they are put are continually evolving. If we think of technologies as static objects, apparatuses, or tools, we lose sight of their social meaning. The Internet, for example, can be described in terms of objective facts about its complex structure, the number of nodes, the number of users, its software protocols, its transmission speeds, and so on. But such descriptions do not begin to capture the meaning of the vast and varied domains of human activity that people engage in on the Internet, from business and finance to research, communication, education, and entertainment. Each person who uses the Internet engages in particular configurations of practices, using particular resources, in collaboration with particular people, for particular purposes. Once a person develops a familiarity with particular resources, he or she is ‘at home’ on the Internet. But my Internet is not your Internet, and no one, anywhere, has done or will ever do everything that can be done on the Internet.Footnote ⁸ Most often we are engaged in local ecologies of activity that involve interaction both with technology and with other people. We work, learn, and play in multiple online spaces as we move across particular applications, resources, and communication channels, and we use these resources in locally relevant – not universally uniform – ways. Facebook as it was used in Egypt to organize masses of people in the 2011 revolution is a different Facebook from ‘my’ Facebook, which I visit only very sporadically to see news from friends. The Internet is therefore an ever-shifting constellation of voices and spaces that are highly subjective.

At the same time, it is undeniable that each online space develops its own culture, embedded both in its design and in its users’ practices. Facebook, for example, provides a structure for people to fill in with their own content. It embodies values like personal agency (e.g., crafting an online self-representation), openness (e.g., sharing personal information and preferences), and connectedness (e.g., multiplying personal connections). But it shapes these broad values in its own particular ‘Facebook’ way. For example, to craft an online self-representation, one uses Facebook's pre-determined categories of information, and the use of pseudonyms is strongly discouraged. Openness can quickly become invasion of privacy when a default setting disseminates one's information more widely than one expects. And personal connections (‘friends’) are not defined by any real familiarity with others, but merely by mutual willingness to be linked within Facebook.

The general approach adopted in this book is that technology does not determine cultural practices, nor does culture determine technology, but rather that technology and culture (and thereby language and literacy practices) are linked by interactive, symbiotic, reciprocal relations. In other words, it is difficult to ‘factor out’ the technological from the social, and the social from the technological. From this standpoint, issues will be framed less in terms of looking at how technology changes language use and more in terms of exploring how people deal creatively with the resources that new technologies present to them as they engage in traditional activities in new ways – or invent whole new social practices that take advantage of the possibilities afforded by new technologies. That is to say, the book is interested in people's eco-social adaptation to technological change, and how this adaptation is reflected in and shaped by their language use.

Most work devoted to the applications of technology to language education has tended to take a relatively narrow view of technology that centers primarily on how the computer and other digital devices might improve language, literacy, and intercultural communication skills. It divorces itself from millennia-old issues of how technology relates to language, literacy, and learning in terms of symbolic and mediational issues that are extremely relevant to educational programs today. One goal of this book, then, is to broaden the scope of our thinking about relationships between technology and language, and to derive implications for language and literacy education.

Literacy

Literacy lies at the interface between language and technology. In Jean-Christophe Rufin's dystopic science fiction novel Globalia, Puig Pujols, a persecuted journalist who has been stripped of his job, is confronted with the problem of how to write a message without his confiscated communications tool (called a multifunction). Having always used a ‘voice converter,’ he had never needed other writing tools. Fortunately, when he was a boy, his Catalan grandmother had insisted that he learn to write, not just to play with writing like other children. Pujols decides to write a paper letter if only he can find the necessary materials. He goes to a store and is offered toilet paper, wallpaper, or glasspaper. He finally finds writing paper in the ‘bricolage’ aisle. For a pen he has to go to the ‘toys’ section.

However far-fetched this may sound, Chinese professionals who use computers extensively are finding it increasingly difficult to remember how to handwrite the characters they learned as children (Demick, Reference Demick2010; J. Lee, Reference Johnstone and Duranti2001), and a Reference Jeannet and Schenk2010 survey showed that three out of four respondents had few occasions to use handwriting in their daily lives (People's Daily Online, 2010). With a keyboard, most users type out the pinyin (phonetic, alphabetic) transliteration of what they want to write and the computer displays a corresponding table of characters from which they can choose. Or sometimes the computer automatically ‘guesses’ the appropriate character based on the semantic and syntactic context. In the US, cursive handwriting is undergoing a similar fate; recent newspaper articles report that young people are finding it increasingly difficult to read handwriting, much less write it (Zezima, Reference Zezima2011), and some state curricula are abandoning all instruction in cursive, focusing instead on keyboarding skills (Webley, Reference Webley2011). Although the phenomenon of ‘forgetting’ handwriting is at present merely anecdotal, it resonates with ongoing debates about the role of technology in learning (for instance, fears of overdependence on spelling and grammar checkers, calculators, Wikipedia, and so on).

Our conceptions and practices of literacy in a particular time and place are always tied to material technologies of writing. Whether it is clay, wax tablet, papyrus, parchment, paper, or liquid crystal display, the materials with which we read and write have each introduced new possibilities as well as challenges for literacy and have each been associated with particular cultures of reading and writing. By this I mean beliefs and attitudes about writing, the specifics of what, when, why, where, and how people read and write, and patterns in who reads and writes and who doesn't. Cultures of reading and writing vary across time and place, of course. What literacy meant to the Ancients is not what it means to us today. And what it means today is not necessarily the same for a Muslim as for a Christian, or for a journalist, or for a graffiti artist, or for a teacher.

Literacy (from Latin lettera, ‘letter’, litteratus, ‘learnedness’) is the know-how needed to deal with the technology of writing – as a reader, writer, sign maker and interpreter – in a given culture.Footnote ⁹ It requires language knowledge, but also a sensitivity to the special ways that language is used differently in writing and in speech. It requires dexterity in using the material tools and surfaces of writing, and also knowledge of how texts are organized spatially. All of this knowledge and practical know-how is gained by apprenticeship and social participation in one or more cultures of reading and writing.

Although literacy practices are socially shared, they are not entirely socially determined. Literacy is also an intensely private and individual realm involving imagination, virtual worlds, symbolic play, aesthetic expression, and affective response that defies established conventions.

Learning to read and write thus involves a great deal more than mastery of a given writing system – it involves a broader ability to understand relationships of visual and verbal forms in a wide array of contexts.Footnote ¹⁰ It involves seeing how writers and readers create discourse worlds mediated by conventions both linguistic and non-linguistic in nature. It also requires the cognitive flexibility to cope with deviance in form. The fact that we can interpret a non-word like ‘sfter’ in ‘Put this away in its box sfter each use’ shows that we have enough knowledge of the language and of the means of production (i.e., the technology of print) to understand deviant forms we see on the page. So flexible are we in sampling and predicting visual input when reading that we can often understand photocopied texts whose right margins have been cut off, or degraded word forms (xf, fxr examxle, x rexlaxe exerx thxrd xetxer xitx an x yox cax prxbaxly xtixl uxdexstxnd xhe xenxenxe). It is this remarkable ability to compensate (which computers do not yet share with us) that allows us to adapt our ways of reading and interpret strings like ru2cnmel8r? in text messages and chat rooms.Footnote ¹¹

In terms of language knowledge, literacy certainly requires familiarity with a language and the script(s) used to write it, but it calls on more than morphological, semantic, and syntactic relationships. Because we read and write texts, and not just sentences, literacy requires understanding relationships between larger units of discourse as well as familiarity with various genres and styles.

Knowledge of spoken language is also important to literacy. In reading a newspaper, for example, one draws on one's familiarity with how people speak in various social contexts and how a wide variety of language events are handled (e.g., press conferences, interviews, congressional assemblies, business meetings, and lectures). Literacy also involves knowing how written strings can be verbalized with different intonation, stress, or accent to reflect different interpretations. Conversely, listening to a news report on the radio or television involves understanding spoken language that is based on a written text – what Ong (Reference Ong1982) calls secondary orality.

Non-linguistic features of texts (such as tables, graphs, diagrams, maps, illustrations, and photographs) as well as punctuation, typography, and layout are also essential, but ‘silent,’ elements in written communication (Walker, Reference Walker1987; Kress and van Leeuwen, Reference Kress and van Leeuwen1996). Literacies of the image (including various forms of data displays) are key to literacies of the word in the sense that if you can't interpret the images, you can't know what meanings to apply to your reading of the words in a text that combines written language and images.

Like technology, literacy has political and ideological dimensions. As Finnegan (Reference Finnegan1989) points out,

Literacy is therefore more than the ability to interpret written signs or produce well-formed sentences. It is what allows us to engage in social practices involving texts and the discourses and ideologies to which those texts are connected. More than a set of normative reading and writing behaviors, literacy is a dynamic adaptive response to new technologies and new social conditions that can involve modifying familiar language practices or inventing whole new ones as needed.

The educational agenda for the book can be summarized as follows: we have entered an era in which the teaching of normative language forms is inadequate preparation to deal with the varied communicative contexts in which we work, learn, play, and shape our identities. Literacy is the know-how we need to produce and interpret texts. We sell our students short, however, if we focus too narrowly on ‘electronic’ literacy. What we need is to teach literacy in the broadest sense: traditional literacy, visual literacy, new media literacy – literacy for communicative competence and for symbolic competence – to show how all mediums influence the design of communication and embody values and fundamental ideas about what communication is. Young people thus need not only grammar and vocabulary, but also literacy heuristics that will help them develop a disposition for paying critical attention to connections between forms, contexts, meanings, and ideologies.

An ecological approach

From the discussion above we can see that language, technology, and literacy all involve social, material, and individual dimensions. What this means is that our approach to language, technology, and literacy must be interdisciplinary. Media studies generally eschew details of language, and language studies tend to minimize issues of material media. An examination of the interrelationships between technology, language, and literacy requires a broad theoretical base that focuses on the human capacity for sign making in ecologies of human activity. The social semiotic framework adopted here is ‘ecological’ in three senses. First, it sees communication not as a matter of people transferring ideas to one another but rather as a matter of people integrating mental, social, and physical activity. This means that we need to look at language not just as a code, but also as a form of human action and experience that is individual as well as social. Second, it assumes that people always act not only in response to immediate situational contexts but also in relation to broader cultural and historical contexts. This means that the signs people use to communicate cannot be analyzed or interpreted as isolated units separate from their cultures and contexts of use – in fact, they cannot even exist as signs if they are divorced from their cultures and contexts of use. Third, the framework is ecological in that it focuses on relationships between language and the physical mediums through which language is used. That is, we need to consider how material interfaces (such as clay, paper, or screen) by their very limitations help us to invent new ways of using and thinking about language.Footnote ¹²

A number of principles derived from this perspective will be developed in Parts I and II of this book, and then applied to educational programs in Part III. These are:

• Signs do not produce meanings in themselves, but interact with their social and material contexts and their interpreters to produce meanings. Relations between forms and meanings are therefore dynamic not static.

• Language, literacy, and communication rely on both convention and invention.

• The medium matters: communication technologies interact with, but do not determine, people's language use and behavior.

• Texts always involve multiple meaning systems.

• Language, technologies, and texts mediate between the social and the individual.

• Texts communicate more than their referential ‘content’ – they also communicate things about their creators, and are therefore instrumental in shaping identities.

• Aesthetics are an integral part of texts and of meaning making, not an add-on.

Outline of the book

The book is organized in three parts. Part I (Designing meaning) develops the notion of communication by design and elaborates on the material, social, and individual dimensions of design processes. Chapter 1 (Communication by design) problematizes information-transmission models of communication, develops the notion of design, and presents a model with material, social, and individual dimensions that will serve as the organizational framework for Chapters 2, 3, and 4.

Chapter 2 (Material resources: why the medium matters) argues that design processes cannot be separated from the material conditions in which they are grounded, for the very meanings that one wishes to communicate may be constrained or transformed – or inspired in the first place – by the characteristics of a particular medium. The chapter explores the notion of mediation and shows how material environments, tools, and technologies matter to language and the ways we use it.

Chapter 3 (Social ecologies) shifts the focus to the social construction and appropriation of communication technologies. Social conventions, genres, ideologies, and cultural attitudes all affect the ways that technologies are taken up and how language is used. To illustrate this point, the chapter begins with a historical vignette of how the telephone came to be used in ways quite different from the purposes for which it was designed. The chapter then moves to the use of computers for social networking, and the new genres, discourse forms, values, and ideologies that have accompanied this development.

Rounding out Part I, Chapter 4 (The individual and design) reminds us that if reading and writing are socially embedded activities involving relationships, shared assumptions, and conventions, they are also individual, personal acts involving imagination, creativity, and emotions. This chapter deals with the idiosyncratic, particular, symbolic, and subjective dimensions of designing meaning. It shows that technologies designed to fulfill one purpose are often appropriated (first by individuals, then by larger groups) for quite different purposes. Whether in language or technology, this variation is closely tied to identity formation, and involves creative combinations of available resources.

Part II (Interactions of the material, the social, and the individual) explores interactions of cultural, historical, and individual dimensions of language use and literacy practices in four case studies (the origins of writing, the development of paper and the printing press, written electronic discourse and multimodal digital media), showing that the underlying problems of adapting writing and reading conventions to both material constraints and social needs are similar across fundamentally different mediums.

Chapter 5 (Ancient writing in Mesopotamia) describes literacy and technological change in the development of proto-cuneiform and cuneiform writing in ancient Mesopotamia. Showing how changes in reading practices accompany changes in literacy technologies, this chapter establishes a historical background with which to make comparisons to what is happening today with electronically mediated communication.

Chapter 6 (Paper and print) begins by asking why printing did not thrive in China or in the Muslim world before being ‘invented’ in Europe, and why paper, not printing, was a catalyst for social, intellectual, and artistic innovation. Even in Europe, print technology did not immediately change the power dynamics of literacy. Print remained a product of and for the elite, scholarly practices remained largely unchanged, and oral culture transformed literacy as much as it was transformed by it. Following a discussion of the relation of printing to spelling and language standardization, the chapter turns to the invention of the typewriter, which initiated the goal of making printing personal, portable, and accessible to the masses. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the semiotics of typefaces.

Chapter 7 (Writing redesigned: electronically mediated discourse) provides an overview of new language forms and discourse structures that have been designed in electronically mediated communication environments. With examples in a variety of languages, the chapter describes how people use phonological and iconic principles to create novel written forms, how pragmatic grammars have developed in the use of affective particles (e.g., LOL, emoticons, emoji), and how technology has impacted discourse structures in MOOs and Wikis.

Chapter 8 (Multimodal discourse) expands the scope beyond writing to multimedia environments that incorporate image, sound, and video. Taking news broadcasts, Korean television overtitles, a YouTube video, and videoconferencing as examples, the chapter shows how mediums interact with language to influence interpretation and create new opportunities for social participation.

Part III (Educational implications) proposes principles, learning goals, and pedagogical ideas based on the discussion in Parts I and II. Chapter 9 (Principles and goals in language and literacy education) develops five principles and corresponding pedagogical goals for language and literacy education, focusing on how material, social, and individual factors influence the ways we design meaning and how mediums influence our fundamental ideas about what writing and communication are.

Chapter 10 (Toward a relational pedagogy) applies the principles and pedagogical goals of Chapter 9 to outline what I call a ‘relational pedagogy’ that aims to foster a critical semiotic awareness by focusing on relationships among forms, contexts, and meanings. I argue that instead of thinking in terms of using technology to make learning more efficient, or more motivating, or more inclusive, or more culturally authentic, we ought to consider ways to use technology to study the very ways it mediates language use, communication, and social meaning.