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Expanding

When I ask people to define, in one or two sentences, the word literacy—what literacy is andwhat it enables people to do—the answers I receive are quite similar. To most people, literacy means the ability to read and write, to understand information, and to express ideas bothconcretely and abstractly. The unstated assumption is that “to read and write” means to readand write text. Although media and computer literacy are occasionally mentioned in thesedefinitions, media literacy is most often defined as the ability to understand how televisionand film manipulate viewers, and computer literacy is generally defined as the skills to use acomputer to perform various tasks, such as accessing the Web. If I also ask people about thenature of language, I usually receive the response that language enables us to conceptualizeideas, to abstract information, and to receive and share knowledge. The underlying assump-tion, so accepted that it is never stated, is that language means words.

Twenty-five years ago, a rather popular book was entitledFour Arguments for the Eliminationof Television.1 Clearly, that vision of the world was not realized: television has not been elimi-nated, and screens—from television screens to computer screens—now dominate our lives.This reality needs to be acknowledged. So, in the spirit of the title of the earlier book, I’d liketo suggest four arguments for an expanded definition of literacy:

1. The multimedia language of the screen has become the current vernacular.2. The multimedia language of the screen is capable of constructing complex meanings in-

dependent of text.3. The multimedia language of the screen enables modes of thought, ways of communicating

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By Elizabeth Daley

I l lustration by Derek Lea, © 2003 © 2003 El i zabeth Daley

Elizabeth Daley is Executive Director of the Annenberg Center for Communication and Dean of theSchool of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in communi-cation arts from the University of Wisconsin. This article is drawn from a paper delivered at the 2002 Aspen Symp osium of the Forum for the Future of Higher Education.

Literac yTHE CONCEPT OF

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most contemporary Americans, although aprinted text or oral explanation might wellcomplement and extend their meanings.However, even if we did not know the con-text of their creation, they would each carry strong meanings and convey powerfulemotions. Multimedia and cinema, thoughsometimes enriched by language, embracemany other elements as co-equal—not only image but also sound, duration, color, anddesign. Think also for a moment of historiccinematic moments: the first moon landing;the planes slamming into the World Trade

Center. What would it be like to try to fully share these and other momentous eventswithout access to the language and powerof the screen?

3. The multimedia language of thescreen enables modes of thought, waysof communicating and conducting re-search, and methods of publicationand teaching that are essentially differ-ent from those of text.Since the Enlightenment, the intellectual

community has valued the rational overthe affective, the abstract over the con-crete, the decontextualized over the con-textualized. These values, combined witha deeply ingrained suspicion of practiceand of the creation of product, make itdifficult to bring the vernacular of con-temporary media into the academy.

 Accepting the language of multimediaas co-equal with text will require a majorparadigm shift that challenges the domi-

nation of science and rationality, abstrac-tion and theory. I am certainly not alonein thinking that this shift is long overdue.For example Stephen Toulmin, in hishighly regarded 1990 book Cosmopolis,eloquently argued for the academy tomove beyond the dominance of theCartesian model.2 But just how difficultthis transition will be was made clear tome a few years ago when a senior aca-demic figure explained why she found itdifficult to judge the worthiness of artistsfor promotion and tenure. She said that

she found their work too specific andlacking an abstract, theoretical base. Itseemed that a professor was more valuedif he or she wrote about art rather thanmade art.

The language of multimedia is, nodoubt, more closely related to the affec-tive and subjective language of art than tothe rational and linear language of sci-ence. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russianfilmmaker, once described the languageof art, as opposed to the language of sci-

ence, as a language of conflict, a dialecti-cal language as opposed to a linear one. When the language of science is appliedto art, he argued, it ossifies art; for exam-ple, a landscape becomes a topographicalmap, and a painted Saint Sebastian be-comes an anatomical study.3

The grammar of multimedia and theways in which it creates meaning are only beginning to be systematically articu-lated. By contrast, the language of the cin-

ema offers us an extensive bodproviding a starting point fromthink about multimedia. In  Vertov, a Soviet documentaryand one of the Russian pionematic language, wrote for thpicture camera a fanciful monmight well be applied to mtoday: “I am a mechanical echine, show you a world the can see it. Now and forever, I from human immobility. I am motion. I draw near and then

objects . . . recording moof the most complex comFreed from the limits ospace, I put together points in the universe where I’ve recorded thepath leads to the creatioperception of the world.in a new way a world un you.”4

One of the fundammatic building blocks, applies to much of mumontage, or the juxtaposiments, both within anshots. For the filmmakerart of editing, and it is coration of cinema. Montaclear and important exam

differently text and multimedimeaning. Through montage, to manipulate time and spacesequences that could never ephysical world but that are thand conceptually related. Momits an interaction between and the receiver, as well as amoments of the creation. It not obut encourages the recombinaments to create new meanings

The famous demonstratiotage by Lev V. Kuleshov, anoRussian pioneers, elucidates th

Kuleshov made a short film seqjuxtaposed a well-known Rusface against three different shof soup, a dead woman in a cogirl playing with a toy bear. Wto describe what they had seenaccording to V. I. Pudovkin, wha student in Kuleshov’s worsisted that the man was hulooking at the soup, joyous wing the girl, and sad when v

March/Apr i l 2003 EDUCA

and conducting research, and meth-ods of publication and teaching thatare essentially different from those oftext.

4. Lastly, following from the previousthree arguments, those who are truly literate in the twenty-first century willbe those who learn to both read andwrite the multimedia language of thescreen.

These four statements are the founda-tional principles for the work being doneat the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at the Annenberg Center at theUniversity of Southern California (USC).

1. The multimedia language of thescreen has become the current vernacular.I often ask colleagues to imagine that they are living and teaching in Padua aroundthe year 1300. Inside the stone walls ofthat great university they lecture in Latin,but the people walking on the streets be-neath their windows, including their ownstudents, speak Italian. Eventually that vernacular has to be embraced (and, in-deed, it was embraced) within the Italianacademy. The corresponding argumenttoday, simply put, is that for most peo-ple—including students—film, television,computer and online games, and musicconstitute the current vernacular.

Print first allowed for mass literacy,and it has been very effective, but to priv-ilege a print language often means to ig-nore the success of the technologies—audio recording, radio, cinema, andtelevision—that have come into existencesince the primary modes of print were de- veloped. These technologies have be-come, for average citizens, the most com-mon methods of receiving information,communicating with one another, andentertaining themselves. It is not hard to

see how the grammar of these technolo-gies has long since invaded our collectivethinking. Metaphors from the screenhave become common in every aspect ofdaily conversations. Close-up is synony-mous for “in-depth” and “penetrating.” We speak of  flashing back to our earlierlives. We frame events to put them in con-text. We cut to the chase when we are in ahurry. We dissolve or  fade out or segue fromone topic to another, and we have back-

 ground sound. We spend many hours at ourcomputers looking at and sharing screens.Students are accustomed to the directemotional experience of music as one ofthe primary factors in creating their iden-tities, and they spend hours playing com-puter games in online communities. Inshort, our shared experiences as humanbeings are more often than not derivedfrom the images and sounds that exist onscreens.

2. The multimedia language of thescreen is capable of con-structing complex mean-ings independent of text. At USC, the highly rankedSchool of Cinema-Televisionis praised, envied, and ad-mired but still held suspect.In the world of a researchuniversity, it remains ananomaly. No university isranked nationally on thebasis of such a school, nor issuch a school considered tobe critical, as are the Depart-ments of Physics and English.

I believe the reason forthis lack of status is not only because media creators andscholars deal with that “dis-reputable” world of enter-tainment but also, and evenmore important, because in their work inthis discipline, they do not give primacy to print. They believe that images andsounds, integrated in a time-basedmedium, can be as important in creatingknowledge and communicating ideasand information as text. At the most fun-damental level, their work does not en-dorse the premise, widely held for thepast two millennia, that comprehensionof and expression through the printedmedium defines what it means to be liter-

ate and, by extension, educated. A few years ago, a colleague sent me an

article that had appeared in the Chronicleof Higher Education. The author, a re-spected art historian, asserted that it wastime for the academy to give up a deeply ingrained suspicion of images and realizethat the visual could indeed contain intel-lectual content, that it might in somecases be equal to text. I assumed that thearticle was a reprint, written in the 1930s

perhaps, but it was current. At that mo-ment, I realized that we at the IML wouldneed to defend not only the idea of a ver-nacular that was a cinematic/multimedia-based language but also, more important,the value of that idea. We had a very longway to go to establish that such a languagemight have clear differences from, andeven advantages over, print in someinstances.

By arguing for the importance of thelanguage of the screen, I do not intend toattack words or print. But print carries its

own technological bias. Print supportslinear argument, but it does not value as-pects of experience that cannot be con-tained in books. Print deals inadequately with nonverbal modes of thought andnonlinear construction.

Like text, multimedia can enable us todevelop concepts and abstractions, com-parisons and metaphors, while at the sametime engaging our emotional and a estheticssensibilities. Rich media, with its multiplesimultaneous layers, does much more than

provide enhancements, illustrations, andtools for enriching, accessing, and transmit-ting the established literacy. Think for a mo-ment of the still images that have definedmany important moments in U.S. history:the photo essays of the Great Depression; asailor kissing a girl in Times Square at theend of World War II; a young Vietnamesegirl fleeing napalm; a college student atKent State kneeling over a body. As icons,they no longer require any explanation for

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Print supports linearargument, but it doesnot value aspects of experience thatcannot be containedin books.

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dead woman. They described his variousemotions with great detail, as proof of hisoutstanding talent as an actor. All ver-sions were, however, the same shot of theman. Nothing in his image had changed.The meaning attributed to each sequence

came only from the collision of the shots. With the computer, we can now elec-

tronically construct images and soundsand manipulate space and time to createmeaning in ways about which our Russ-ian progenitors could only dream. Thetools of keying, compositing, and morph-ing are more than ways of misrepresent-ing truth. They enable the construction ofhigher orders of meaning, nuance, andinference. Synthesizing and sampling, aswell as simultaneity, are natural to multi-

media, permitting a form of bricolage, aprocess through which, in the words ofJohn Seely Brown, one is able to “findsomething (perhaps a tool, some opensource code, images, music, text) that canbe used or transformed to build some-thing new.”5

Interactivity as a core factor in multi-media is in some ways closely related toperformance and can enable the viewer/reader/user to participate directly in theconstruction of meaning. It is perhapsworth digressing for a moment to note

that whereas performance has long beendevalued as “entertainment,” the art ofstorytelling, always performative, hasbeen a major way of transmitting cultureand values throughout human history.

The very vocabulary of multimediaencourages approaches different fromthose used to write text. One “creates” and“constructs” media rather than writing it,and one “navigates” and “explores” mediarather than reading it. The process is ac-

tive, interactive, and often social, allowingfor many angles of view.

The physical production techniquesused to make multimedia and the prac-tices of distributing it also differ from themodels used to produce and publish text.First, and perhaps foremost, the produc-tion of multimedia is most often an act of

collaboration. A film, large or small, israrely made by one person. The “film by”credit is most often the manifestation of aparticular business practice and does notreflect the true nature of authorship orthe process of creation. This collaborativeprocess may be reduced in scale in multi-media projects, but it is still typical. It liesin the very nature of the creative processand does not fundamentally change be-cause of the difficulty or simplicity of thetools that are required.

Second, the final product—be it a

film, a television program, or someother form of multimedia—is most suc-cessful when it emerges in large partduring the process of creation. A scriptor scenario or storyboard provides aguide, but if one wants to go beyond thepredictable and formulaic, there needsto be room for discovery and evenserendipity during the production orcreation of a film or multimedia docu-ment. One of the great U.S. filmmakers,

 Walter Murch, who edited The English

Patient, among other well-known films,refers to this process as the “collision ofintelligences” that produces somethingunforeseen by the creative team, aprocess that allows for and respects in-tuition. In some ways, this process con-stitutes a type of active research inwhich one studies what one is doingwhile doing it. Such work demands a cli-mate open to experimentation and awillingness to explore and fail—an“ecology of experimentation,” to borrow a term from a University of Michigan

document.6

It allows for rapid iterationand quick changes of direction.Third, media forms are usually meant

for public distribution and presentation.They are intended to be seen in environ-ments beyond that of their creation. In thebeginning at IML, both students andfaculty felt that student projects were pri-

 vate and meant for viewing only by thestudent and the professor. Over the pastsemesters, however, we have seen the

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Multimedia, so ubiquitous toyoung people’s experience,often seems to be

particularly hard for themto analyze or deconstruct.

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nature of authorship change. Students nolonger write to please only the professor.They want to be understood by theirpeers and by others who will see and ex-perience their projects. They considerthemselves to be authors who possessexpertise in a certain research area. Like-wise, faculty in IML workshops are intent

on making their own research projects ac-cessible to those not in their discipline.Faculty in the humanities and in arts andsciences—from disciplines as diverse asquantum physics, art history, and philoso-phy—have found common ground, in-sights, and points of access into the peda-gogical and research issues in oneanother’s disciplines. Certainly not allwork in a discipline will be understand-able to those without training, but for in-terdisciplinary work, faculty must find alanguage to speak across the boundaries.

Multimedia may well have the potential toprovide a much-needed new space inwhich cross-disciplinary conversationcan occur between the humanities andthe sciences.

4. Lastly, following from the previousthree arguments, those who are truly literate in the twenty-first century will

 be those who learn to both read and write the multimedia language of thescreen.

 After a hundred years, the language ofcinema has been rather well defined, anda large body of critical literature exists.The production methodologies are alsoquite well understood and articulated, al-though that knowledge often seems torest primarily within the oral culture ofthe filmmaking community. Even withthis history and ample evidence of theskill required to construct media, the atti-tude widely held by both faculty and ad-ministration is that complex media textsdo not deserve classroom or research

time, especially if such study might takeemphasis away from traditional activitiessuch as essays and research papers.

Since the 1960s, universities and col-leges and even high schools have taughtso-called media or visual literacy courses.These courses, however, have had twolimitations. First, they often seem to havean underlying assumption that televi-sion, cinema, and related media are infe-rior communication forms that may mis-

represent reality, since media at its worstmanipulates us and lies to us and at itsbest is superficial. These courses, so far asI can see, enforce the belief that real edu-cation remains in books and that realknowledge is rational and linear. Stu-dents are taught to read visual texts inorder to defend themselves against the

onslaught of visual culture. Second, thesecourses have been extremely one-sidedin the definition of literacy, focusing on a“read only” approach. Full literacy de-mands the ability to write, as well as toread. I was recently told by a very well-known scholar that images are less usefulthan text because one can interpret im-ages many ways but words are far moreprecise. I wondered if he had never hadthe experience that most us have on adaily basis—that of saying, “No, what I re-ally meant to say was . . .”

The current situation is further com-plicated by the widespread assumptionthat students already have an adequateknowledge of screen language and multi-

media. No doubt, young people today have less fear of the computer and moretechnical ability with software for richmedia; multimedia is indeed their every-day language. However, they have nomore critical ability with this languagethan do their elders—perhaps less. They need to be taught to write for the screen

and analyze multimedia just as much as,if not more than, they need to be taught towrite and analyze any specific genre intext. Generally, they have had instructionin text at the secondary level, but rarely have they received similar instruction formultimedia. Multimedia, so ubiquitousto their experience, often seems to beparticularly hard for them to analyze ordeconstruct.

 Anot her co ns id eratio n is that al -though the academic study of film,media, and audiovisual culture has estab-

lished pedagogical precedents that pro- vide theoretical building blocks for thecritical application of film, television, andmultimedia into higher education, it is

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common to see media integrated into dis-ciplines across the curriculum withoutthese important critical tools in place.Films or segments of films are screened in

 various classes “to engage students” in thesubject matter. Often this usage appearsto have occurred without appropriate re-gard for the nature of audiovisual media,

its inherent meaning and structure, the

cultural context of its creation, or theconsequences of dissecting it.

The most glaring examples of thispractice have occurred during the pasttwo decades in history departments,where film has become an integral part ofthe curricula. Despite initial resistance,dramatic narrative films are now recog-

nized for their ability to bring the past “to

life,” creating an emotional impactthat is thought to exceed that of writ-ten texts. However, most history andhumanities faculty are not trained to

address the rhetorical codes and nar-rative strategies of cinema. Thus, his-torical films are frequently analyzedempirically and are evaluated accord-ing to the same criteria as are conven-tional historical documents. Withouta background in film theory andscreen language, students and faculty do not read a film as the product ofhighly developed systems of signifi-cation embedded in a cultural con-text. By contrast, they have beentaught these skills for textual narra-

tives since their early stages of readingeducation.To read or write the language of

media and understand how it createsmeaning within particular contexts,one needs some understanding offrame composition, color palette, edit-ing techniques, and sound-image rela-tions, as well as of the mobilization ofgeneric and narrative conventions, thecontext of signs and images, sound as a

conveyor of meaning, and the effects of ty-pography. Such principles as screen direc-tion, the placement of objects in the frame,color choices, morphing, cuts, and dis-solves all do much more than make ascreen communication aesthetically pleasing. They are as critical to the creationof meaning as adverbs, adjectives, para-

graphs, periods, analogies, and metaphorsare to text. Multimedia also requires thatattention be paid to design, navigation,and interface construction. The mouse,the click, the link, and the database havealready taken their place alongside moretraditional screen descriptors.

Outside of schools of film, instructionin these formal elements of multimediaand cinematic construction is not pro-

 vided in the same way that it is in Englishor foreign languages. In fact, even themost cursory knowledge of media is not

included in the general education curric-ula of most colleges or universities.Higher education institutions requirethat students learn not only the contentbut also the formal techniques of suchauthors as Steinbeck, Hemingway, andFrost well enough to discuss both thecontent of their work and their creativestyle in light of an established body of lit-erary theory. Such work is highly unlikely to be required in media of any kind. Atbest, one course in “the arts” may be

required, but it is unlikely to be a courset h a t r e q u i r e s t h e e q u i v a l e n t o f alanguage lab.

 At the IML, we are committed to em-powering faculty and students to choosethe best language for the task at hand. Insome cases, this language may well be lin-ear text, and in some cases, it may be one ormore kinds of multimedia. To make thatchoice, a faculty member or student musthave a command of the elements of multi-media and screen language and must un-derstand how to use that command to cre-

ate and disseminate knowledge.

The Institute for Multimedia LiteracyMy work with multimedia literacy begana few years ago when one of the most fa-mous alumni of the School of Cinema-Television, George Lucas, asked me a very provocative question. “Don’t you think,”he said, “that in the coming decade, stu-dents need to be taught to read and writecinematic language, the language of the

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Even the most cursoryknowledge of media isnot included in the general

education curricula of mostcolleges or universities.

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screen, the language of sound and image,just as they are now taught to read andwrite text? Otherwise, won’t they be as il-literate as you or I would have been if, onleaving college, we were unable to readand write an essay?”

 As I flew back to Los Angeles that day, Iknew that he was correct. What I did not

fully realize, at 25,000 feet over the Pa-cific, was that what he had so casually sug-gested was likely to be highly disruptivewithin the academy. I was rather new tothe university at the time and assumedthat the proposal would be ofconsiderable interest to col-leagues. However, whenI called a leading fac-ulty member in theDepartment of Eng-lish to suggest thatwe explore ways of

incorporating teach-ing some basic multi-m e d i a w r i t i n g i nfreshman composition,I was greeted with pro-found silence.

My colleagues in the Schoolof Cinema, however, strongly endorsedthe idea, and in the fall of 1998, we beganwhat would become the USC AnnenbergCenter’s Institute for Multimedia Liter-acy. We started with one course in which

students who were not cinema majorswere required to create a multimediaproject, in their own discipline, thatwould have the intellectual rigor ex-pected in a five-to-seven-page term paperbut that could be “explored” (i.e., read)only on the computer screen. This multi-media project could not be printed out ashard copy. It had to employ sound andimage; it had to be time-based; and it hadto be interactive. Needless to say, we allfound this assignment challenging. Thesefirst students came from anthropology,

history, sociology, and English literature.Today, we oversee classes that incorpo-rate work in the extended literacy of multi-media throughout the undergraduate cur-riculum at USC, as well as in satelliteclasses at Berkeley, at Cal Tech, and in twoLos Angeles–area high schools. Each se-mester, we offer a group of faculty the op-portunity to participate in our program forthe first time, while faculty from previoussemesters continue to work with us. So far,

more than two thousand students andforty faculty have been included. The fac-ulty are assisted by teaching assistants andpost-docs from the Division of CriticalStudies in the School of Cinema. All are re-quired to attend a summer workshop con-ducted by continuing post-docs but also,and most important, by faculty who have

taught in the program previously. Peermentoring operates at all levels. The goal isto help the incoming faculty members re-think the content of their courses. We ask 

them to clearly tell us what it is thatthey want to teach, and then

we try to help them dis-cover how the language

of multimedia mightfurther that goal. Wealso ask them to as-sess their currentr e s e a r c h t o s e e

how the languageo f m u l t i m e d i a

might offer freshperspectives or at

least suggest a new ap-proach to their current ef-

forts. We hope that in doing so,they will connect their teaching to their re-search in more direct ways. In the work-shop, they must author their own project,which must be specific to their discipline.

 At the same time, they are engaged in re-

designing their syllabi to include multime-dia projects.Courses drawn into the program have

ranged from gender studies to quantumphysics, from Slavic studies to philoso-phy. The projects vary just as greatly inapproach. Some are structured around

 Web sites, as in the case of the Slaviccourse in which the students developed asite enabling visitors to navigate the textof Crime and Punishment through maps ofSt. Petersburg. Another student site, cre-ated in an Asian American literature class,

explicated the novel Woman Warrior  by examining the abuse of women, fromfoot binding to corseting, using popularculture images that inculcated these prac-tices into belief systems. Other classeshave worked with databases, as in the“Culture of the 1960s” course in whichthe students collected oral histories. Thefaculty member will use this materialboth in his own research and in futureclasses. Most recently, we are seeing the

creation of elaborate interactive games.Over the past few years I have become

more convinced than ever that the rap-idly developing language of multimedia—the language of the screen—can bring im-portant new approaches to research,publication, and teaching. Now we sim-ply have to accept the challenge to em-

brace the paradigm shift that is requiredto bring this vernacular into the academy.Fortunately, I have colleagues who agree.For example Dr. Mark Kann, chair of theUSC Political Science Department, re-cently stated: “It seems to me that at somepoint, multimedia expression is going tobe like writing: it’s something you don’tleave college without. Kids are very so-phisticated in navigating on computersand surfing the Internet. I think pretty soon they’re going to have to be as sophis-ticated in expressing themselves using

the media. And I wouldn’t be too sur-prised if at some point a multimedia pro-gram that is the equivalent of freshmanwriting will start appearing at universi-ties. It will become a requirement forgraduation.”

The concept of a language composedof elements other than word and text isneither fundamentally new nor particu-larly revolutionary. Rather, this conceptis an evolutionary development of theideas and practices that have been with us

since people first struggled to leaverecords and tell stories. Technology issimply enabling these alternative waysof communicating to penetrate ourlives more directly and in more powerfulways.e

Notes

1. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow, 1978).

2. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).

3. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 46.

4. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. AnnetteMichelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: Uni- versity of Ca lifornia Press, 1984), 17– 18.

5. John Seeley Brown, “Learning in the Digital Age,”in Maureen Devlin, Richard Larson, and Joel Mey-erson, eds., The Internet and the University: Forum2001 (Boulder, Colo.: EDUCAUSE and The Forumfor the Future of Higher Education, 2002), 71–72,

(accessed January 21, 2003).

6. University of Michigan, President’s Information Rev-olution Commission Report, April 2001, (accessed January 21,2003).

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