Becoming Screen Literate

We are peo­ple of the screen now, says Kevin Kelly. When we were peo­ple of the writ­ten word, we devel­oped a long list of inno­va­tions and tech­niques to per­mit ordi­nary read­ers and writ­ers to manip­u­late text in ways that made it use­ful (think: quo­ta­tion sym­bols, tables of con­tents, page num­bers, indices, foot­notes, bib­li­o­graphic cita­tions, and of course, hyper­links). We will do the same to sup­port screen fluency:

With our fin­gers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone cam­era will cap­ture a land­scape, then dis­play its his­tory, which we can use to anno­tate the image. Text, sound, motion will con­tinue to merge into a sin­gle inter­me­dia as they flow through the always-on net­work. With the assis­tance of screen flu­ency tools we might even be able to sum­mon up real­is­tic fan­tasies spon­ta­neously. Stand­ing before a screen, we could cre­ate the visual image of a turquoise rose, glis­ten­ing with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen lit­er­ate, maybe even faster. And that is just the open­ing scene.