The Gutenberg Galaxy and the Readers Education.

Author: María Teresa Blasco Quílez

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University of Valladolid, Spain.

Keywords: Literacy, reading competency, teaching and learning, new communication technologies.

Article style and source: Peer reviewed, original ultiBASE publication.

Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• The Limits of Reading
  • Being a reader and reading. The concept of literacy
  • The persistence of commonplaces that must be revised
  • Reception: A Possible Answer?
  • Intertextuality and Transtextuality.
• Reading Competence, Media Competence
  • A problem of structures and languages
• Forming Competent Readers
  • Some problem
• References

Abstract

Literacy is a subject that appears in policy programs, psycho-pedagogical approaches and conversations between teachers and parents. As every burning point in society, the problem of teaching and learning to read is charged with stereotypes, such as the death of readers in fight with the New Communication Technologies. Such a commonplace is a sign of a quite restricted view about this matter that we have to change. In this paper I am doing a reflection on the limits of the literacy concept, the meaning of a media competence and the education of readers in the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Introduction

The utopia of The Gutenberg Galaxy (MacLuhan, 1969) has been trivialised to the extent of becoming one of the great dragons of the twentieth century: the death of reading at the hands of the global village. The same as other commonplaces, the idea of reading being in danger has a shaky foundation, in this case an interpretation of MacLuhan’s ideas, which in my opinion is out of focus. Furthermore, it prospers under the protection of other clichés such as the eternal struggle between the old and the new or the archetype of the "enemy that will come and destroy us", (Quintillá, 2001). Moreover, the supposed battle between reading and the mass media [i] trivialises a real problem, that of forming readers in the society of disinformation.

Teaching reading is one of the typical functions of the school. For teachers it entails the task of contemplating the reality of those we are educating, beyond stereotypes. The better way to fight against myths is to approach them. Therefore in this article I shall try to meditate on reading in the communication society in order to find ways for forming readers. back

The Limits of Reading

Being a reader and reading. The concept of literacy

Wells (1986: 195) defined reading as: 'being prepared to confront different texts suitably in order to come to the action, feeling or opinion proposed in them within the context of a particular social field""Nowadays, this definition arises new frontiers under the term multiliteracies (The New London Group, 1996). The multicultural society of the XXIst century and the new communication technologies (NCT) broaden the concepts of text [ii] and social context. Consequently, the act of reading entails, more than ever, being able to receive different cultural patterns and meaning channels. Although, the open minded, active attitude that Wells describes as "being prepared" was necessary since literacy exists.

The command of written language is situated "at the beginning of the social contract" of the great civilisations (Manguel,1998). It changed relationships among people from the moment when codifying and transporting certain knowledge was considered useful. Reading and writing have given human beings the power to build their own reality, create new contexts and even change the course of history. As Aguilar(2000) points out, the prestige acquired throughout history by written language has established a "social frontier" between the literate [iii] (reader) and the illiterate (non reader).

However, the image of the reader who has knowledge versus the non-reader, who has no access to it, is somewhat superficial despite its apparent logic. Being a reader does not lie so much in receiving information, but rather in how we understand and handle it. If so, we must admit that there is more than one way of being a reader, and more than one way of being illiterate.

The existence of many ways of reaching texts appears throughout the history of reading. We live in cultural backgrounds - Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist - where there is a cult for books that are studied in full awareness of the impossibility of unravelling their meaning [iv]. Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote his poem "Intelijencia" "(1918) pursuing "the exact name of things, Kafka complained of not finding the true meaning of what he read, Saint Exupèry, dedicated The Little Prince "to Leon Werth when he was a child". These examples are just a glimpse of how the frontier between literate and illiterate becomes blurred. No doubt, being a reader becomes complicated because it not only requires decoding the reading material but also using and registering it as well as being creative and critical.

Despite of this, the concepts of reading and reader seem to be quite restricted for many teachers. Therefore, we can speak of commonplaces that must be questioned

The persistence of commonplaces that must be revised

In November 1999 I participated in a Course on Qualification for practising teachers.[v] The foci of the sessions in which I intervened were reading and writing. Most of those attending the course were teachers with many years of professional experience. I decided to take this as a basis to introduce problems related to teaching and learning, how to read. One of the activities I proposed was reflecting on and comparing how their students used reading in and out of school. The assumptions about reading stated by this group can be summarized as follows:

a) "Today pupils do not read like they used to" 
b) "Television and computers are a threat to reading"

These forceful ideas were gone into in detail and discussed by the participants in the working sessions. Teachers have noticed a change: Reading as a vehicle of information and entertainment was substituted by other forms of leisure and/or learning. Such alternatives - TV, Internet- were looked on with apprehension because they were seen as a threat to the act of reading.

The truth is that access to the so-called mass media has changed the reading habits of the pupils. But the idea of media endangering reading might be a symptom of a somewhat restricted view of this problem.

We must consider these issues for two reasons. On the one hand, the school identifies learning to read as an educational target. It is thus expressed in the curricula of the different levels of compulsory education in terms such as:

"show an interest in written language and value it as an instrument for information and enjoyment"(…) "use reading as a source of pleasure, information and enjoyment (...)" ; "read comprehensively and autonomously"; "use oral and written language as an instrument for carrying out new learning" (...) (MEC, 1992 : 165)

On the other hand, this problem materialises in specific educational situations [vi] which would have to be revised in order to deal with reading didactically.

Understanding reading as a teaching/learning matter entails taking into account the contexts in which it is developed beyond the school gates. The appearance of new supports or media for information requires the teachers to accept them in the classroom in order to prepare the pupils for them. This means broadening both the idea of reader and that of reading.

Reception: A Possible Answer?

If we admit that there are as many ways of reaching texts as there are readers, then we would have to conclude that it is the different ways of transcending reading that differentiate some readers from others. From the Aesthetics of Reception (Díaz-Plaja y Prats, 1998) we are told of a reader who interacts with the text in order to construct meanings. The reader enters into a dialogue with the texts. Reception integrates different levels of reading, from the functional to the epistemic. This approach can be seen as a path opening up what we understand reading to be and what is more, what we consider readable.

Vilches (1986) speaks of an understanding of the media that goes beyond the conceptual and the perceptive, an understanding in interaction with the message, to reach the information not explicit in it. For his part, Mendoza (1999), along the lines of Iser (1978) and Bakhtin (1981), defines the process of reading as a "dialogue" between reader and text, a colloquium in which the reader constructs meanings based on his or her prior knowledge of the world and of the readings preceding each new text. It seems that an interchange with a text, whether printed or from the media, is necessary both for the reader of books and the reader of the media.

Within the Aesthetics of Reception two notions appear: intertextuality and transtextuality. These concepts show that references to what is known are moving from the literary world to the scene of other supports for reading. back

Intertextuality and Transtextuality.

With regard to the interchange between texts and readers, intertextuality takes on a special relevance. That is the presence of one or several texts in others (Mendoza, Colomer y Camps, 1998), created as a conscious and necessary flow between readers and reading. Conscious, because the one who writes or emits uses these allusions - intertexts - as keys for interpreting what is new. Necessary, because those who read or receive have to have a command of those same keys if they wish to understand what they have before them.

This co-presence of texts and of the cultural references they contain is also another crossroads where reading and media converge Aguilar (op. cit.: 48). The media refer to literary texts more or less explicitly and the literary texts appear inevitably impregnated with the languages of the media.

Also spoken of is "film intertext" or "television intertext", of tributes made between media texts and literary texts and of mutual references in one or the other. The television reader will surely recall commercials which appeal to our knowledge of common narratives, fairy tales and myths. [vii]. Beyond the conspiratorial wink in advertising, mention must also be made of the allusions to the media in futurist and surrealist literary trends, the re-creations of literature in cinema or music and, in turn, the imitation of filming techniques or references to the world of new technologies on the part of twentieth century writers.

The steady flow of texts surpasses the frontiers of intertextuality to move on to a broader notion: transtextuality (Mendoza and Lopez, 1996). Here, some texts transcend others; they form part of them in such a way that references to known elements are transgressed in order to create new products.[viii] Here, perhaps, is the third coupling between media products and reading, a link that readers make, with different results.

We book readers/media readers are not foreign to the process of transtextuality. Rather, we integrate the different readings into our conceptual networks, such that it is almost impossible to separate one from the other. As Mendoza affirms, "(…) it is not so easy to exclude or differentiate among our readings (…) and this is because by reading them we made them ours and assessed them and because their contributions participated in the building of our literary competence" (1996: 15).

The Aesthetics of Reception show us that using the media can have points in common with reading, i.e. receiving, decoding, interpreting, reconstructing, analysing references to other texts and navigating through them consciously, to produce meaning.

Given that reading means comprehension (Cassany, Luna and Sanz, 1994:193); (Colomer and Camps, 1996), the media are not a challenge for or against reading but rather a challenge of reading - the challenge to interpret texts, to take advantage of their possibilities and to look at them critically (Aguilar, 2000b). On the whole, the social communication media are surprising us with their diversity of languages and supports and demanding from us a special type of reader: A reader who seeks and finds his or her own routes. back

Reading Competence, Media Competence

We have already said that reading is the conscious displaying of a set of abilities such as decoding, comprehension, and metacognition. Those who do not have these skills are labelled as functional illiterates.

Delgado (1991:127) brings up the notion of "image illiterates", people who have difficulty in grasping the messages that images send us beyond their outer characteristics. If we transfer this concept to the relationship that most of us mortals maintain with the media, the figures of illiteracy might increase dramatically. Perhaps the next question to pose would be what it means to be "media literate".

As we have just seen, several points of connection exist between the media and reading, from the point of view of those who read or receive. Readers and receivers must enter into a dialogue with texts in order to decode or interpret what they are receiving. If we are accustomed to transcending what we read, then why are we not equally successful with the media?

A problem of structures and languages

The transition from literary text to media texts is difficult, in my opinion, for one reason. The different structures and discourses involved transform the type of interchanges between reader and text and receiver and medium. The written text, at least apparently, permits us the ease of following an almost linear order. We can anticipate, take the time to read more or less attentively and integrate its structures into our own. Reading thus becomes a conscious and voluntary act in relation to the text.

With other media we must adapt to other types of formats. Radio, television, and computers can give the impression of recreating linear structures (posing of the question, crisis, dénouement) when actually they deal simultaneously in several structures and we can receive information from all of them at once. The media force us to change our concept of tempo and mode, because they are redundant and mix the synchronous with the asynchronous.

Begioni, Costanza, Ferreira and Ferrâo (op.cit.) affirm that new ways of reading have arisen because the media, by the way they arrange information, have exchanged linearity for multimodality. Clara Ferrâo (2000) highlights among other characteristics the ability of television to combine concentration and heterogeneity in images with discursive supports.

This is not the only case. Hypertext, for example, is difficult to handle because the connection networks it articulates are less tangible and the reading process sometimes comes to a dead end. There then arises the reading of itineraries that can become true labyrinths if the person navigating them lacks a conscious route. The appearance of the hypertext, together with the development of Internet, has, in part, given the final backing to the Gutenberg Galaxy and once again unleashed a veritable flood of apocalyptic prophecies about the future of reading and readers.

For my part, I believe that the prophecies are somewhat empty of meaning, given that the readers integrate readings into conceptual networks that the hypertext merely imitates. Moreover, there are texts written in the traditional way, which contain clearly hypertextual elements. As an example let us recall El Aleph, by Borges, Rayuela, by Cortázar or Joyce’s Ulysses, not to mention the academic or exegetic texts, whose networks for linking with other texts are evident [ix].

Apart from structure, before I mentioned another fundamental difference between the possibilities of dialogue with the literary text and our opportunities for interaction with the media texts. This difference lies in the type of language. The media present the information very effectively because they combine diverse supports and mix different discursive structures in order to reach people. Their apparent simplicity -we see, hear and are swimming in information - hides mechanisms, which we do not stop to look at, listen to or navigate. The tempo of the media surprises us. Its success and our failure are to be found in this surprise. The relationship with the media is disguised as immediate and is apparently simple, so that it can come to be involuntary. Therefore this kind of reception is opposed to the act of reading, which as I have pointed out before, entails a will to transcend what one is reading [x].

Media competence involves resorting to our traditional reading skills and adapting them to the changes in the form in which information is offered and set out. This transition, which is complicated for competent readers, becomes a barrier for those who are struggling with the usual supports for reading. This can be appreciated in transcoding experiences [xi] where inexpert readers usually have problems in bridging the intercode distances and tend to redundantly reproduce the discourse of one of the supports in the other.

The commonplace of reading being threatened by the media seems somewhat displaced if we take into account that our reading skills will allow us to develop media skills. To undo the myth of the global village, of a single connected type of thought, competent readers must be formed as "explorers", as MacLuhan himself declared in The medium is the message, "on the lookout for information", who will become a "unique and irreplaceable specimen". back

Forming Competent Readers

Some problems

Forming competent readers, or "explorers", is not a simple task. Neither traditional reading nor the media offer their bounty to just anyone who approaches them; rather, experience tells us that the messages only reach those prepared to receive them, integrate them and filter them with a critical attitude. The passive reader or receiver is condemned not to ignorance but to unawareness. Despite this, those who form readers have to face some difficulties.

In the first place, as Clara Ferrâo argues, as teachers trained in a culture transmitted in a linear fashion we are constantly at a disadvantage with respect to pupils accustomed to the multimodality of the mass media.

Furthermore, we must learn to accept that to a large degree we are caught in a reading-media dichotomy, which diminishes the possibilities of reading. On the one hand traditional reading is valued as good and as a privilege of the few; on the other hand, the media are either deified or belittled by being described as "mass". Yet there are still rare occasions on which, from the school, they are considered without prejudice as objects of reading. Paradoxically, in Savater’s words (1988:10): "Nowadays, both young and old read more than ever, even if on screens rather than paper".

Given this state of things, one might reflect, not so much on the future of reading, which is enjoying better health than we think, but rather on the future of readers. Given that readers are formed at school -as I have already said, one of the most classic functions of the school is teaching to read- we must take into account those who form them.

The relationship between the media and reading has been the subject of controversy during the last century. In this text I have meditated on the persistence of some commonplaces and on the role that I think readers should adopt. The educating of this type of active reader requires in turn teachers/readers formed in "complexity and not in reduction" (Begioni et al., ibidem: 31).

Since it would be a matter of teachers/readers we would be speaking of professionals capable of:

• transcending the text and the supports of reading
• instructing how to receive actively.

Knowing and knowing how as a reader comprises what Barrio (1999) called a 'technical dimension' of reading.

In this culture of reception, the notions of intertextuality, transtextuality and multimodality become essential as roads for a didactic treatment of the act of reading.

The transcoding mechanisms (De Amo and Sáiz, 2000) can become a valid option for examining these concepts in depth.

The teacher/reader who uses texts consciously for forming him/herself and for forming others enters into what Barrio calls a "pedagogical dimension" of reading

He or she has to pose the problem of teaching/learning from the students’ knowing how to be in the world. In this case, he or she, a perspective in which he or she is obliged to adopt a critical stance with regard to the messages and cultural references gathered from what is read.

This twofold role of the teacher as a person who approaches the world through texts and who guides others to reach the texts from the world, means that he or she must adopt an integrated approach which would attempt to encompass the diversity of ends and uses of reading and go beyond the forms in which it is presented.

Giroux (1988) echoes Dewey’s criticism of teacher training that centres excessively on the command of one skill and neglects the educational and social problems entailed in the teaching/ learning of this skill. Transcending the texts entails developing mechanisms for "critically interpreting" the "personal and social worlds" of those who read. This attitude will in turn become an educational objective for the students.

The metaphor of the global village has never been closer to reality than at the present time. It seems undeniable in a world where something apparently so simple as a change of date can become a reason for economic alarm. We now hear of "hollow" computers, with a virtual hard disk, which only works when the user connects to it. In this age of prophecies it is up to us to demystify the power of the connection, to no longer consider it the equivalent of uniformity and to create conscious readers who will overcome the melancholic hope of Bradbury’s book-men. back

Aknowledgement:

I would like to thank Mark Laidler, Marita Mueller and the Editiorial board of
Ultibase for their patient work in reviewing and editing this article.

Notes

[i] The traditionally so- called mass media are TV, Press, Radio and Cinema. Nowadays some of them are considered as part of the new communication technologies. In this article both terms (media and NCT) will be used indistinctly.
[ii] NCT texts include not only written communication, but also audio, visual or spatial meaning frames.
[iii] A person is functionally literate when he has acquired the knowledge and skills in reading and writing which enable him to engage effectively in all those activities in which these abilities are normally assumed in his culture. Gray (1956: 19)
[iv] Let it suffice to recall the centuries of studies of the Talmud, the Koran and the Bible which have continued until our times, and the conflicts that have arisen from the way in which one or other sacred text is understood.
[v] Course on Qualification in Audition and Language carried out through a collaboration agreement between the University of Valladolid and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture. Module III.  Development of Linguistic Skills. Given during the academic year 1999-2000 at the Faculty of Education in Valladolid.
[vi] Where the teachers participate with their ideas on what reading is.
[vii] In the last two years the Spaniards enjoyed the adventures of Estella Warren as a coquettish Red Riding Hood in the golden forest of Channel No. 5, among the advertisements televised over Christmas 2000 and 2001.
[viii] Antonio Mendoza and Amando López (op. cit. p. 3.) point out as an example of transtextuality Roald Dahl’s Snow White or El país de la real Gana by André Maurois. Consol Aguilar (op. cit.) gives many examples of transtextuality of literary texts to the media and viceversa.
[ix] Landow(1995: 16) speaks of the academic text as a forerunner of the hypertextual form of giving information.
[x]  Nevertheless, we must remember that cases of involuntary reading also exist. Cassany, Luna and Sanz (op.cit.) mention, for example, the reading of publicity pannels on the street.
[xi] De Amo and Saiz (2000) analysed the production of Infant and Primary school pupils who prepared comics based on diverse literary texts.  These examples reveal the phenomenon of excessive faithfulness to the literary narrative order and the redundancy in the anchor sentences used to clarify the content of the images.

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About the authors

María Teresa Blasco Quílez
Departamento de Didáctica de la Lengua y de la Literatura.
Facultad de Educación.
Universidad de Valladolid
email: tbq@dlyl.uva.es