Foreword
By Sue Thomas
I’ve been working with writing and computers for over 20 years, and all that time I’ve been trying to figure out what this new technology really means. I’ve watched the computer evolve from a glorified typewriter to an incredible portal for the imagination in which writing is both multimodal and interactive. Through the lens of computers and the Web I have seen text take second place to image, sound, and video. I have seen writers and readers begin to view themselves not as isolated individuals but as members of a connected collaborative community. For 10 years I led such a group, the trAce Online Writing Community, which at its peak around the turn of the millennium had around 5,000 members in over 30 countries across the world.
Today, when I give talks about new media I like to include a clip from an old movie about even older movies—Singin in the Rain. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen play a couple of romantic idols from the silent movies who find themselves under pressure to adapt to new media—in their case, sound. This 1952 film is set in the late 1920s just after the unexpected success of the first talkie The Jazz Singer. As readers will know, many silent film stars were left with ruined careers by the coming of the talkie. In Singin in the Rain, Hagen plays Lina Lamont, a beautiful and famous silent movie star whose voice, unfortunately, in no way matches her looks. Kelly is Don Lockwood, her onscreen romantic partner. Lockwood has a better voice but is still quite clueless about how to behave on a sound stage. The performers and crew muddle along with their hapless director as they try to adapt to the terrifying multimedia future, which has raced up on them like a giant wave and threatens to engulf everything in its path. In fact, the technical challenges of the talkies were enormous for everyone—actors, producers, and the crews, not to mention the audience itself, who at first did not really understand how to appreciate movies with sound. And of course that wasn’t the beginning. Only a couple of decades earlier there had been no such thing as a movie audience anyway. In fact, there have always been new media and new skills to learn. But the stories we tell with them remain universal. For example, no matter which technology we use to recreate it, the story of Romeo and Juliet forever remains a tale of two star-crossed lovers.
But there does still seem to be something extra-different about the electronic age. All new technologies challenge popular prejudices, but in recent years fast-moving developments in digital entertainment media have forced audiences, authors, and industries to revise their opinions about what defines taste, value, skills, production, and distribution. The entire financial model upon which publishing and media industries have based their practice is being overturned, and the ways in which artists and writers create work, and in which audiences consume it, are undergoing radical changes.
In short, we are having to learn to read and write all over again, and this has exposed a new kind of literacy—transliteracy. Transliteracy is not new—indeed it reaches back to the very beginning of culture—but it has only been identified as a working concept since the Internet allowed humans to communicate in ways that seem to be entirely novel. To be transliterate means to be able to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio, and film, to digital social networks. The word is derived from the verb “to transliterate,” meaning to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language. Transliteracy extends the act of transliteration and applies it to the increasingly wide range of communication platforms and tools at our disposal. From early signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, and film, to networked digital media, the concept of transliteracy calls for a change of perspective away from the battles over print versus digital and a move instead toward a unifying ecology not just of media but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction, and culture, both past and present. It is an opportunity to cross some very obstructive divides.
That’s why this book is so important. It is not just an invaluable store of knowledge about the history of communication from the earliest days to the present, but it can also be read as a manual of transliteracy. The digital can be a daunting arena—so many unfamiliar concepts and words, so many skills to learn. Whether you are a producer, a writer, a teacher, or a consumer of digital storytelling, this volume will build your confidence, bring you up to date and, most importantly, introduce you to the drama and pleasure of enjoying stories in ways that are both entirely different from anything you have known before whilst at the same time feeling extraordinarily familiar. Carolyn Handler Miller’s approach is informative and inspiring. I am indebted to a mutual friend, the artist Jack Ox, for introducing me to Carolyn via email when I was looking for guest lecturers for De Montfort University’s online Master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media. Holding our classes in cyberspace means we can avail ourselves of the best teachers around the world, and it was our very good fortune that Carolyn agreed to work with our students. To date, though, our paths have never crossed in physical space. I very much hope that they do, and soon.
In 2004, Ken Goldstein ended his Foreword to the first edition of this important book with “we are still at the beginning.” Well, it’s almost 2008 and I think it’s fair to say that we are still “still at the beginning.” But what a fascinating, challenging, and mind-moving beginning it is turning out to be! May it go on and on.
Sue Thomas
Professor of New Media
De Montfort University, Leicester, England, October 2007
http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/~sthomas/