Language, Literacy and Technology - Richard Kern

Language requires a medium and an accompanying technology.

"In speech, the medium is sound waves moving through air, and the technology is the collection of processes involved in articulating, hearing, and interpreting sounds. In sign language, bodies, space, and light constitute the medium, which requires an embodied technology of producing, perceiving, and parsing gestures. In writing, the medium is a surface or space, and the technology involves the use of material tools to inscribe and interpret graphic signs." p.4

Forms of communication are protean, i.e. they tend to or are able to change frequently or easily.

On literacy

"Our conceptions and practices of literacy in a particular time and place are always tied to material technologies of writing.  Whether it is clay, wax, tablet, papyrus, parchment, paper, or liquid crystal display, the materials with which we read and write have each introduced new possibilities as well as challenges for literacy and have each been associated with particular cultures of reading and writing.  By this I mean beliefs and attitudes about writing, the specifics of what, when, why, where and how people read and write, and patterns in who reads and writes and who doesn't.  Cultures of reading and writing vary across time and place, of course.  What literacy meant to the Ancients is not what it means to us today.  And what it means today is not necessarily the same for a Muslim as for a Christian, or for a journalist, or for a graffiti artist, or for a teacher.