Based on this expanded definition of literacy, the English language arts standards address not only reading and writing, but also speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing. Teachers and students from a variety of school settings have discussed literacy with us in a series of focus groups. With impressive consistency, teachers and students linked literature to paper-based presentations and literacy to decoding and encoding printed text. On the other hand, media logs kept by these same teachers and students indicate that they, like most Americans, get by far the majority of their news, information, and entertainment through electronic sources. We believe these more complex abilities can and should be applied to electronic as well as print literatures.
Electricity is fast and ephemeral.
What once was tangible, relatively permanent, invariably sequenced, and largely alphanumeric has become insubstantial, more easily transformed, flexibly sequenced, and multimodal. Electronic literature might empower or hinder the development of English language arts and literate thinking. Let's consider three illustrations of electronic literatures. Videos show temporal changes in visually vivid and realistic representations and provide holistic information about physical environments and the body language of speakers. They can be used to create multimodal environments rich in affect and interpretive possibilities.