Introduction

This book moves beyond narrowly defined explanations of literacy to understandings that capture the complexity of contemporary literacy practices within a broader social order, what Brian Street (1998) and others have called a ‘new communicative order’. In particular, this new communication order takes account of the literacy practices associated with screen-based technologies. It recognises that reading and writing, considered traditionally as print-based and logocentric, are only part of what people have to learn to be literate. Now, for the first time in history, the written, oral and audiovisual modalities of communication are integrated into multimodal hypertext systems made accessible via the Internet and the World Wide Web. Silicon literacy practices represent the ways in which meanings are made within these new communication systems (Snyder 2001a).