Right, the third in emerging globalization that we will explore
is characterized by the digital as a means of manufacturing meaning.
And it's a moment that allows signs, and images and
sounds to be produced by exactly the same tools,
so it is another really revolutionary moment that is bringing much change.
In fact, it's changing again in different ways, the way we're organized,
the way we work, the way we play, the way we relate.
But importantly for us in this module on literacies, it is changing
the balance of power between the different modes of meaning making.
And particularly it is challenging language,
written language, as a privilege form of meaning making.
>> Things begin to change by about the second half of the 20th century.
There is some very interesting and big changes that begin, and
interestingly they begin before the digital age.
They begin with photography which is a printing process where you can put images
and texts on the same page and
it was writing and image can go on on the same page.
We also then have the rise of new visual media and oral media, whereby
it's possible to communicate across distances using visual and oral modes.
We have the television which uses images that can be transmitted across
space and we also have things like the telephone and
the telegraph which allow communication across space.
The telephone allowing oral communication across space.
>> We're in the middle of this tremendous change.
In fact, it's only existed for about 60 years and it's changing everyday.
Everyday we are seeing new phenomena and new impacts because of
the different ways in which we can make meaning now, mediated by the digital.
And as educators, we have to ask ourselves,
are we prepared to enable learners to make meaning by harnessing
the affordances of the new technologies and the new ways of making meaning.
We're doing that across all the disciplines or
we're doing it across all the social domains.
What does it mean to prepare anyone to have a repertoire of meaning making nodes?
What are the values?
What are the skills?
What are the sensibilities?
How do we do that?
>> What we then have is the arrival of the Internet and
what's interesting about the Internet, in its first phase it's very,
very multimodal, and in it's second phase too for that matter.
In both phases it's very, very multimodal.
In the first instances, what's called Web 1.0, the initial version of the web,
it's a very transmission model of pushing messages out there in the world.
But the interesting thing about the web from the very beginning is the fact that
images and text can appear in the same space.
What's interesting about Web 2.0 is the fact that is very,
very interactive, it's not just searching for things and navigating and looking at
screens the things that are transmitted to you but it's actually very dialogical.
And what it ends up becoming is a kind of a form which brings us back to the oral,
the first languages were primarily oral in the sense that they were spoken and
they were in real time.
Web 2.0, which is very, very interactive, is, in a way,
a kind of a conversational form.
It's a kind of return to a lot of what human
interaction was like in first languages, but it's also very different.
It's not to say that it's a, it's just a return but
what's interesting is that it's as different from the regime,
the classical regime of literacy as that was from first languages.
>> Is it possible that in this third globalization of
literacy, is it possible that we are might be becoming synesthetic again
as were the peoples of the first globalization, the peoples of [UNKNOWN?
Is it possible now, as we see images predominating as messages,
as writing takes on multiple forms, as other modes
are made possible to us through the digital manufacturing tools that we have?
Anywhere, anytime is there something that's happening to this
idea of literacy that is expanding in ways that will create
different ways, different power relationships, and
different lives, and different opportunities?
And there are lots of example of it from what Twitter feed has done to
communication, what video instruction might do, what MOOCs might mean.
What is an essay now days?
How do we use audio?
All the multimodal ways in which meaning can be made now is available to any of us,
children, adults.
We carry it with us in devices, this capacity.
Perhaps, it'll be implanted in our skin as we move around and
we could be able to record and communicate.
The world is changing tremendously in terms of our capacity to receive
information and to deliver information in multimodal ways, any time, anywhere.
>> What we also have in this world is intense multimodality.
Wherever we are, in space, whether we're watching television, whatever we're doing,
whether it's Web 2.0, that we have this mixture and this interweaving of image,
and text, and space, and color,and sound and
all these things come together because the media
allow, support those kinds of multimodality.
In an analogist way to the way the first languages would take
multimodality as well.
The last change which is interesting, if you recall,
we were talking about writing originally being the privilege of an elite.
So it was the priests, the few Lords who are collecting stuff from you,
who are writing lists and property lists and whatever, so
that was part of the system of inequality,
and then when we go into modern times, it's an elite who use literacy.
Although we have mass literacy it's journalists and writers and
specialists who are the makers of most of literate culture and
the rest of society is the consumers, the mass readership.
So we have a literate society where an elite produces and
the majority are mostly consumers of literally takes one way or another.
Now, what we have in the digital world is this interesting shift to the fact that
we are readers and writers all together.
So, in social media or in Web 2.0,
in a lot of these spaces, in web places where we're documenting what we do, so
rather than be passive recipients of communicative messages,
we are equally communicators and people communicated to.
And those things are interrelated very closely together.
So this is an interesting moment in the fact that there are very
big shifts in these communicative practices.
Language differences sort of become important again,
and they also become possible again, and insignificant again.
What's interesting is that on the web, the underlying
character set is a thing called Unicode, which includes every human language,
including lost languages like Linear B, everything is there.
And it means that on the web, we can have Arabic and English and
Spanish all together, and what we can do is if in your Facebook feed,
you've got somebody who is an Arabic speaker or a Portuguese speaker,
or Greek speaker, and they're making their posts in the middle of your feed,
you can simply translate it.
So, one of the ironies of this moment, is that these technologies which bring us
together also allow us to be more different, and
allow extraordinary differences of language to be inter linked in the same
space by Unicode machine translation, all these interesting new methods.
And the other interesting thing as well,
is the revival of historical languages which can be documented, recorded,
people can speak in those languages in these spaces.
To go back to Yolngu in northeast Arnhem land, there are projects of digitization
and even a character created in order to be able to represent a particular set of
consonant sounds which don't appear in quite the same way in any other language.