Literacy is a vast field of study, which by itself could cover dozens of pages if one were to attempt to give an accurate and detailed description of it. To add to the confusion the term has become even more complicated in recent years, as social, cultural and economical changes have paved way for new technology and media, broadening the use even more, a fact that will be further dealt with later in this chapter. In its original form, literacy is a linguistic theory that deals with different aspects of written language. Very simplified the term literacy can be explained as ‘the ability to read and write’. However, as new media have become increasingly important in our daily communication, the concept of literacy has been further complicated.In Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress problematizes the notion of literacy. He notes that with the technical revolution of recent years and the rapid development of new media forms there has been a change from a world were the printed word dominated communication to a world where visual communication via images has become increasingly important. Thus, literacy, a theory with its roots in written language and linguistics, can no longer be treated as the sole means for understanding communication. Furthermore,  changes surrounding literacy compels us to reconsider the theory that has dominated conceptions of writing over the last decades. New media forms have decreased the significance of writing when it comes to communication. “Other modes are there as well, and in many environments where writing occurs these other modes may be more prominent and more significant”  Consequently, the linguistic theory of literacy can no longer alone explain the meaning of multimodal messages. “Language and literacy now have to be seen as partial bearers of meaning only”. This means a change from a purely linguistic theory to a theoretical framework that involves semiotic aspects as well: “From a theory that accounted for language alone to a theory that can account equally for gesture, speech, image, writing, 3D objects, colour, music and no doubt others”

Today it shows up in a variety of contexts – musical literacy, cultural literacy, emotional literacy, even sexual literacy, only to name a few. In these cases, the term has come a long way from its original usage, but seem to imply the experience, knowledge and different skills needed to master a certain area. Kress opposes these new uses of the term and argues that “the more that is gathered up in the meaning of the term, the less meaning it has. Something that has come to mean everything, is likely not to mean very much at all”. In his view, literacy is the term to use “when we make messages using letters as the means of recording that message”.However problematic, these uses of the term are frequent, and although not exact, they do in some way offer a handy explanation to the intended meaning. As previously mentioned, media literacy is often used when discussing competencies connected to new media forms. Media literacy as referring to “the knowledge, skills and competencies that are required in order to use and interpret media”, but also notes that it is difficult to give a precise definition of the term. “To talk about ‘literacy’ in this context would seem to imply that the media can in some sense be seen to employ forms of language – and that we can study and teach visual and audio-visual ‘languages’ in a similar way to written language”. However, this has been proven difficult. Attempts to develop a theory of film language, have time and again encountered obstacles. “It is very hard to find analogies between the ‘small elements’ of film (shots or camera movements, for example) and the equivalent elements in verbal language (the word or the phoneme)”. In Narrative in Fiction and Film. An Introduction, Jakob Lothe also mentions this fact. Drawing on the thoughts of French semiologist Christian Metz, he notes that “the closest we get to the verbal-language notion of word in film is not the frame but the shot”, but that a camera shot is much more complex, probably more similar to a complete sentence or even a whole paragraph. Lothe uses the word ‘horse’ as an example. In written language, ‘horse’ is a single morpheme – the smallest unit of meaning, but in a film, this single object cannot be shown without simultaneously carrying much more information, for example ‘over there is a horse’, ‘the horse is black’, ‘the horse is standing by a tree’ etc.To compare film communication to linguistic communication is therefore problematic, since the two have their own different logics. Writing, with its roots in speech, is organized by the logic of time and of the temporal arrangements of its parts, whereas image is ruled by the logic of space and of simultaneity of its visual elements. There is, of course, temporality in films as well, but  the temporal arrangement of the parts in a text works at a different level. Words are put together with other words, forming clauses, sentences and paragraphs which carry the meaning in a specific order. “There is a ‘reading path’ set by the order of the words which I must follow. In a written text there is a path which I cannot go against if I wish to make sense of the meaning of that text” (Kress 3, a critic). According to Kress, images do not have this compelling path. Every single object in an image is filled with meaning that hits the spectator simultaneously, and he or she must choose his or her own path to create meaning.The two media given particularly interest in this essay, literature and film, the book and the screen, are in turn organized by the two kinds of logic previously mentioned. The book is dominated by the logic of writing and the screen by the logic of the image.