Comments on: TeleRead, Obama, and text literacy vs. Kevin Kelly’s ‘screen literacy’

By: Brian Carnell

Brian Carnell — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:02:00 +0000

“Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text.”

And that’s a serious problem, since most of the alternatives to text do not support extended arguments very well (neither does snippetization).

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:27:24 +0000

Pond, excellent points. As I see it, the facts argue for a mixed approach.

While I continue to think that text should be the main show—for greater ease of locating information and remembering the basics, if nothing else—I appreciate the turkey example.

I saw that clip on MSNBC. No writer could have conveyed the information as well as the clip did. But with a textcentric approach going beyond captions, the incident should be easier for historians to locate in the future. I want both the text and video!

Thanks,
David

By: pond

pond — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:12:36 +0000

Remember though: text literacy killed oral literacy (if you will) – once men started writing things down to remember them, they promptly lost their own ability to memorize. Losing the oral tradition is a big part in what killed poetry (traditional poetry I mean). We lost a lot of our ability to appreciate the sound and music of words once we switched mainly to scanning glyphs on a page for meaning. Speed reading courses usually start with an effort to kill ‘sub-vocalization,’ the tendency to half-pronounce the words we read, which slows down the process of pure mental/visual decoding.

Should we then mind if ‘screen literacy’ kills text literacy? Maybe.

One edge that text literacy has over screen literacy is the ability to re-transmit without using a gadget.

If I read a news story, I can repeat verbatim the text to you when I see you for coffee – providing that I can remember it. Even if I can’t recall it exactly, I can give you a fair gist of it.

On the contrary, if I see a video of the news, I can give you a summary, without however being able to convey the full effect of the images and sound. An example would be trying to explain the effect of seeing the latest Sarah Palin interview that’s on YouTube where she is reminiscing about the recent campaign while standing in front of the turkey farm, where a man with blood-stained trousers is decapitating a couple of turkeys. I can sum up the image, and I can explain how I felt about it, but there is no way I can communicate to you that experience – you have to watch it yourself.

And on the third hand, the actual interview clips give us viewers a lot more information than the verbatim transcript in a news story. It’s important not only to know the words that are spoken, but also the manner of speaking, body language, and inflections.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:27:16 +0000

Exactly, Gary. I’m not saying text-only—I’d just hate to see YouTube be the main search tool (even though I want to see it remain as a helpful option). And of course I agree that the different media can build on each other. In fact, I’d like to see more e-books with illustrations since you can repro them more easily than for paper books. And videos to augment texts? Of course, when practical. While I see text as the main show, there’s plenty of room for video. Thanks. David

By: Gary Frost

Gary Frost — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:17:59 +0000

The caption has text meaning and the image has visual meaning, but the real charm of the transmission of caption and image is their potent interaction; the caption says something visual and the picture says something textual. This is not the environment for narrow advocacy. Print and screen, textual and visual literacy, source and surrogate should all be construed as composites.