Beyond Words

If you are reading these words on paper or in an inert form on a screen, you are participating in our most enduring written form of communication. We'll call it "plain text," and it's been essentially the same since Mesopotamia, through the ages of the scribes, Gutenberg, the typewriter, and the word processor at the end of the last century. We have cleaned it up over time and improved distribution, but the act and the process of what we think of as writing have changed little since the innovation of papyrus transcended the communication arts of the cave walls, clay, and stone.

On the other hand, since the turn of the last century, the knowledge and the technological ability to communicate with media other than words has been dominated by the arts and entertainment industries.

Now that we are in the digital era, image, moving image, sound, interactivity, mass distribution, and other advancements are readily available to the individual author, and if these new dynamic media are, in fact, emerging to challenge the primacy of plain text in our daily communications, we are witnessing the first true communications revolution in more than five thousand years. If "reading," for instance, now includes "watching" and "hearing," "waiting," "responding," and often "writing," something truly has shifted in the foundation.

As the practice of what we have traditionally considered reading and writing quickly evolves, someone must step forward to inject the critical and practical skills needed by the individual to match this tectonic shift in the core. Is your institution prepared to address the basic literacy needs of the 21st century, or shall we leave the job to Hollywood?

About Stephanie Barish:

Stephanie Barish is the founder and Senior Partner of the Creative Media Collaborative, a consulting group spearheading projects and publications designed to spread multimedia expression and scholarship. CMC seeks out and fosters innovations in multimedia expression, developing means of applying them on the ground level of educational and professional settings and cultures in the twenty-first century. Barish is an award-winning producer and a prominent figure behind leading multimedia initiatives that are expanding our understanding of what it will mean to be literate in the twenty-first century. In October 1999, the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center invited Ms. Barish to direct a pilot initiative to foster multimedia literacy. She founded and designed the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and, as its executive director, led the organization through five years of growth and progress toward its goals of exploring and realizing the potentials of an enhanced literacy - one that envelops elements of sound, moving and still image, screen language, interactivity, and the written word. Notably over the past year she spearheaded the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship, USC's first and only university-wide honors program; fostered the Wallace Annenberg Continuing Education Initiative and an MA in teaching program in collaboration with the Rossier School of Education; and promoted strategies for enriching medical education through multimedia with the Keck School of Medicine. Prior to joining USC, Ms. Barish's work as multimedia producer and director at Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation included the award-winning interactive CD-ROM Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, the Foundation's acclaimed research interface, its award-winning website, the interactive learning center for the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance, and work on its Academy- and Emmy-Award-winning documentaries. Ms. Barish holds an MFA in computer-generated imagery and an MA in social science.