A host of progressives protest that literacy is much more complicated than a simple technical mastery of reading and writing. This claim is supported by most of the relevant academic work over the past 20 years. These studies argue that literacy can only be understood in its social and technical context. In Renaissance England, for example, many more people could read than could write, and within reading there was a distinction between those who could print and those who could manage the more difficult task of reading manuscript. An understanding of these earlier periods helps us understand today’s crisis in literacy debate.

There does seem to be evidence that there has been an overall decline in some aspects of reading and writing- you only need to compare the tabloid newspapers of today with those of 50 years ago to see a clear decrease in vocabulary and simplification of syntax. But the picture is not uniform and does not readily demonstrate the simple distinction between literate and illiterate which had been considered adequate since the middle of the 19th Century.

While reading a certain amount of writing is as crucial as it has ever been in industrial societies, it is doubtful whether a fully extended grasp of either is as necessary as it was 30 or 40 years ago. While print retains much of its authority as a source of topical information, television has increasingly usurped this role. The ability to write fluent letters has been undermined by the telephone and research suggests that for many people the only use for writing, outside formal education, is the compilation of shopping lists.

The decision of some car manufacturers and self defense product companies to issue their instructions to mechanisms as a video pack rather than as a handbook might be taken to spell the end of any automatic link between industrialisation and literacy. On the other hand, it is also the case that ever- increasing numbers of people make their living out of writing, which is better rewarded than ever before. Schools are generally seen as institutions where the book rules- film, television and recorded sound have found no place; but it is not clear that this opposition is appropriate. While you may not need to read and write to watch television, you certainly need to be able to read and write in order to make programmes.

Those who work in the new media are anything but illiterate. The traditional oppositions between old and new media are inadequate for understanding the world which a young child now encounters. The computer has re-established a central place for the written word on the screen, which used to be entirely devoted to the image. There is even anecdotal evidence that children are mastering reading and writing in order to get on to the internet. There is no reason why the new and old media cannot be integrated in schools to provide the skills to become economically productive and politically enfranchised.

The new media now point not only to a futuristic cyber- economy; they also make our cultural past available to the whole nation. Most children’s access to these treasures is initially through television. It is doubtful whether our literacy heritage has ever been available to or sought out by more than about 5 per cent of the population; it has certainly not been available to more than 10 per cent. But the new media joined to the old, through the public service tradition of British broadcasting, now makes our literacy tradition available to all.

Author Bio: Joseph Pressley is a certified TASER instructor and a Tae Kwon Do black belt and a father of two. He is the co-founder of BestStunGun.com which provides a good variety of Pepper Spray and Stun Gun for personal protection. To learn more on how these products can save your life, please visit http://www.beststungun.com.

Category: Writing
Keywords: Self defense product,literacy,electronic media,cyber- economy,writing,reading