How I Learnt to Stop Worrying about Apostrophes...
A former subeditor muses on high-tech illiteracy

Andrew Calcutt

Surfing the literary festival programme on the way to Hay on Wye, I was alarmed by the arbitrary use of the apostrophe. Is this event sponsored by The Sunday Times, I wondered, or the Daily Star?

The part of me that used to be a subeditor, back in the days when paste-up artists would not touch copy that did not carry a union sticker, mourned the passing of old-fashioned, grammatical practices. Invited to Hay to chair a seminar in the Institute of Ideas strand entitled Creativity, Curricula and ICT, I considered recruiting the audience to a campaign against 'a-literacy'. This is the term used by American academic and librarian Daniel Boorstin to describe the inability to write, derived from the growing tendency to surf a myriad of information sources rather than sitting down to read, and inwardly digest, books.

I need not have worried. One of the panellists under my watchful eye turned out to be author and educationalist Sue Palmer, who has recently played a key role in rewriting the national English curriculum and reinstating grammar within it. Grammar, explained Sue, is empowering if you have it and disempowering if you do not. In her contribution to the Hay debate, she went on to promote the writing of grammatical English as the precondition for literacy, defined as the handling of abstract ideas in written form. Instead of encouraging students to write as they speak, as has been the fashion until recently, she insists that they gain the ability to speak with greater precision, "to speak as they should write", as a consequence of having learnt to write accurately and coherently.

With the national curriculum in safe hands like these, I felt I could stop worrying about the future of the apostrophe and look forward to teaching the next generation of undergraduates, confident that they will be more literate than many of those currently enrolled at British universities.

Sue gave an example of the sort of disorganised prose which today's teenagers frequently produce. Such 'Joycean' streams of consciousness have been much in evidence for more than 25 years, she reported: this kind of writing is characteristic of the computer age and can be traced back to the television age which preceded it.

The title of our seminar was Surfing or Reading: does the medium matter? Sue and I agreed that it matters a lot: the acquisition of literacy has been largely dependent on books, and is likely to remain so. We also agreed that only when readers have become fully literate are they qualified to make independent use of a wide range of information sources. But we started to part company when Sue seemed to blame the rise of a-literacy on TVs, computers and their influence. To my way of thinking, these vessels are too empty to be directly responsible. By the same token, the style and content of many recently published books is not empty of techniques and themes which contribute to a-literacy.

Sue compared the precision of analytical writing to the much looser narratives characteristic of teenage writing today. But there is no necessary trade-off between narrative (chain of events in a cause and effect relationship, within space and time) and analysis (comparison striving towards theorisation by means of a chain of arguments in a cause and effect relationship). Historically, the development of analysis and narrative were interdependent, rather than mutually exclusive. Thus the origins of the novel were concomitant with the high point in political economy.

There are narratives... and there are narratives. In the fictional narratives of Jane Austen, there is a dynamic relationship between highly particular dialogue and descriptions, and more abstract commentary. This relationship is noticeably absent in more recent fiction, which seems to operate either in the flat mode inaugurated by Ernest Hemingway, or its mirror-image, the deliberately overblown cartoon style currently represented by Martin Amis and Will Self. My suggestion, then, is that books qua books cannot save us from a-literacy, in that many writers of books are already representative of a flattened culture where surface is all, and depth tends only to exist as inflation (depth in an ironised form). If this is true of fiction, the various academic strands grouped together under the heading postmodernism suggest it is also true of analysis and theory.

On the other hand, computers do not set levels of a-literacy, especially if literacy is defined in relation to abstract thinking. At the level of programming, computing requires a high degree of abstract thinking. I cannot think of any process that requires more abstraction from the particular than the universal reconfiguration of data into combinations of 0 and 1, the digits underlying all digital production. Abstract thinking is therefore a precondition for computer-oriented production. This is in marked contrast to the way we have chosen to consume computer-related products, ie. surfing, which is entirely consistent with an a-literate culture generally hostile to abstract thinking.

The reliance of computing on abstraction suggests that the tendency to dwell on the surface is culturally driven, not technologically determined, as Sue Palmer seemed to suggest. To my mind, literati and digerati are equally complicit in the rise of a surface-only, i.e. superficial, culture. At Hay, I learnt to stop worrying about the apostrophe, but found something else to be concerned about - something much bigger than a printer's tadpole.

Andrew Calcutt lectures in multimedia and journalism at the Docklands campus of the University of East London