literacy in the new media age

I agree with Kress’s idea that the screen is becoming (has become?) a more potent medium than the page and that people are reshaping, remediating the look of the page to imitate the screen. Kress notes that “it is possible to see writing becoming subordinated to the logic of the visual in many or all of its uses,” and tries to refute three different objections to this claim. I find it hard to accept his refutations though. For example, he argues that most of the books currently being written and distributed are “collections of worksheets” whose aim is to “involve students in action around topics…”—in essence, not really books (7). Maybe I’m missing his point, but it seems like if you walk into any bookstore, you can see this is not really the case. Next, Kress implies that while “there is more writing than ever before,” that writing is done by “those who grew up in the era when writing was clearly the dominant mode” (7). In other words, young people are not the ones doing this writing. It seems quite the opposite to me. The digital age has made it so easy and appealing for young people to write, and many take advantage of the new digital media to express themselves politically, emotionally, culturally, etc. The writing may take a different form than traditional writing—blogs, fan fiction, instant messaging, e-mail, message boards, even posting comments on sites like myspace, facebook, youtube, etc.