"If You Can't Handle This, I Am Sorry"

Phaedrus Media is a typical Web site these days, especially in a university town like Austin, Texas.



It advertises a new technology-related small business, probably run out of someone's home. It offers examples of work in a portfolio; if you click on "portfolio," you jump to another index page that offers a choice among "graphics," "bleed" (for bleeding edge technology), and "java" prototypes and demos.


If you then click on "graphics," you get a selection of thumbnail graphics, which can be enlarged.


After you enlarge a few of the abstract graphics, some of which are animated, you might wonder what the point is, so look more closely at the words beside the thumbnails:

genesis jellyfish
Created in: Painter 4
Notes: genesis jellyfish. I don't know what it means, but the image is kind of cool. That's why I animated it. It was animated in Painter, too. (Painter has very nice animation and rotoscoping tools).

Soon you begin to suspect that the Web site is the creation of an adolescent, and you're right. Phaedrus Media is the Web site of Ben Syverson, who was 15 when he created the site.

Among his peers Ben is exceptional, but he is hardly unique. Thousands of teenagers now have personal Web pages, many of which display the multimedia capabilities of the Web. The Web sites of two young women from Community High in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are more typical of teenager's personal pages. Seventeen-year-old Jessica Draper has a Web site called "llanarth's lair," with the title illuminated by flashing multicolors, making the letters appear in motion across the page.



If we scroll down her page, we find text that announces her dog rules and a long clickable list of what she finds cool, including email.


Next is Kate Levy, whose first page says, "This is Kate Levy's site. I am Kate. My homepage uses frames. If you can't handle this, I'm sorry."


At the bottom is a blinking message that requires concentration and several seconds to read. It says: "Blink tags are annoying. interesting, huh? I think so. But not really . . . oh well . . . maybe someday I'll understand you. O if things never change, I won't. Of course things do . . . change is good . . . someday everything will change. INCLUDING YOU!!!"

I find these sites remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the considerable design talent of these adolescents. Compare, for example, Time Warner's Pathfinder site, which is the work of professionals and cost many thousands of dollars to produce.



But far more interesting is how these sites are intersections of three long historical trajectories: the development of writing systems going back at least 5,500 years; the development of images going back at least to cave paintings 30,000 years ago, and the development of capitalism that is variously dated but at least a few centuries old. Why I should even want to discuss the materiality of literacy is not obvious because a literate act assumes an object, a text that can be read. Yet it was precisely that object that one of the ideals of Enlightenment rationality--the ideal of the transparent text--sought to erase. It took decades of critical and empirical studies to convince scholars that texts are not transparent and that reading and writing are situated acts, but the ideal of the transparent text still persists in perceptions of literacy held by much of the public.

The ideal of the transparent text entails several other presuppositions, foremost that "true" literacy is limited to the abstract representation of sounds, thus placing syllabic and logographic writing systems at a lower level and banishing pictograms and images to the status of illiterate. Scholars of the history of literacy have shown us just how much cultural baggage conceptions of literacy have carried.

The loathing of mass-produced images is part of that cultural baggage. Barbara Maria Stafford has examined how current attitudes toward images were formed in eighteenth-century England, when educated people began associating images with ignorance, illiteracy, and deceit (110). These attitudes followed from the Protestant mission of defeating the mindless auditory, visual, and olfactory credulity of Catholicism with the power of reason expressed in print. In the nineteenth century these prejudices began running squarely against an increasingly shared world culture of images made possible by new technologies.

The crisis for the prevailing concept of literacy caused by these new technologies is expressed in a poem by William Wordsworth, signed in 1846, commenting on the mass publication of illustrated books and newspapers following the appearance of The Illustrated London News in 1842: 

DISCOURSE was deemed Man's noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought--dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand.
Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood--back to childhood; for the age--
Back towards caverned life's first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing?  Heaven keep us from a lower stage!
Wordsworth's lament has been uttered again and again in the century and a half since his poem, "Illustrated Books and Newspapers," was written. Each new popular image technology has brought accompanying cries that "dumb Art" has captured the reading public of "this once-intellectual Land" and caused "a backward movement surely."

The emergence of the World Wide Web at the end of the twentieth century provoked an eruption of jeremiads about how the Web is destroying literacy as we conceive of it in the academy--that critical thinking and reflection, a sense of order, dialectical interaction, logical relations in texts, depth of analysis, trails of sources, and the reform mission of public discourse are all going to be lost. Even those who take a more balanced view fear the multimedia capability of the Web will undermine the power of prose. Jay David Bolter writes, "The new media . . . threaten to drain contemporary prose of its rhetorical possibilities. Popular prose responds with a desire to emulate computer graphics. Academic and other specialized forms respond by a retreat into jargon or willful anachronism" (270). The coming of the Web, however, does not have to be viewed as a loss to literacy. Images and words have long coexisted on the printed page and in manuscripts, but relatively few people possessed the resources to exploit the rhetorical potential of images combined with words. My argument is that literacy has always been a material, multimedia construct but we only now are becoming aware of this multidimensionality and materiality because computer technologies have made it possible for many people to produce and publish multimedia presentations.