ABSTRACT
Every generation produces amongst its wider agenda of concerns one or two issues which define its fundamental anxieties. Literacy is fast becoming a favoured candidate for one of these. The reasons aren’t all that hard to find. The technologically developed societies of the world-no longer just of the West-are moving from an era defined by industrial production into a new era, defined by ‘information’. It is the new raw material and the new commodity. It has its own new technologies, which at times seem to be producing the vast changes in which we are all caught up, and yet are also no more than a part of a complex web of factors which are interlocked in a dynamic of their own making; or so it seems.
