ABSTRACT
For about a decade now, scholars have been declaring that the age of printed text is all but over. Jay Bolter claims that we are now in “the late age of print” (2) and in 1994, Sven Birkerts estimated that printed books would be dominant for about another fifty years (121), to be replaced almost entirely with online hypermedia forms of communication. But regardless of whether one agrees with these and other obituaries of the print medium, it would be difficult to deny the importance of electronic and other visual media in today’s society. The students now entering our classrooms have grown up with 100 channels of television, and the World Wide Web is no longer a novelty, but part of their social, academic, and working lives. If we include nonelectronic sources of visual communication such as billboards, print advertisements, and the ubiquitous packaging that has taken such an important place in our consumer culture, then we have to conclude that most of the information that our students are exposed to is in a visual form.
