New Age Literacy

In the new age of literacy, print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge. What will replace the printing press is electronic textuality. Bolter does not predict the end of literacy; he, however, claims the computer will simply be the technology that will support literacy into a new age. Electronic texts allow writers to construct their discourses in multiple dimensions, exploring alternative pathways for connecting and developing information.

Working in a hypertextual writing space, the writer uses visual as well as verbal elements to structure and represent knowledge. The arrangement of topics, their order and their relations to one another, can be mapped on a plane, displayed as a hierarchical tree, or represented in some other scheme. Electronic texts combine graphical elements and words in a powerful space: the computer screen. In an electronic environment images provide an organizing structure for the words.

What will be lost is not literacy itself, but the literacy of print.

Jay David Bolter