So there is a certain irony in me standing here today, representing a privately owned, commercially minded TV station asking: Literacy, what is it? Access, power, privilege. Belonging. Enabling. Yet I insist, I remain impressed by how few academics, how few intellectual interest groups, how few aggrieved minorities have approached me with a plan. Where are they? Where’s the democratic media revolution? Where are the homemade documentaries? What’s coming out of university multimedia facilities? We have a national network here, folks. Let’s use it like the televangelists do. Save some illiterate souls! Think commercially, charismatically. In case you haven’t noticed, the public trough is drying up. Together we ought to be finding sponsors, underwriters, advertisers. This revolution is brought to you by Nair Hair Removal Gel!

It seems to me the sky is always falling for academics. We receive dire warnings that reading is on the wane. The esteemed George Steiner has remarked that while the classical act of reading broke down around 1914, the real trouble began with modern media: “Guttenberg was not a fundamental revolution,” he has written, “as the current technological revolution is.” But before television, how many people were literate? What romantic idea do we harbour of a well-read populace of yore? Besides, television actually requires a great deal of reading – there’s text on the screen all the time. And, as communications technologies converge, try getting around the Internet without reading skills. I might propose that, in fact, the classical act of reading broke down around 1923, at the Frankfurt School, for in my experience, critical theory on campus has done far more damage to basic literacy skills than TV ever did. The tortured prose! A simulacrum of language! The de(con)struction of English. The murder of the author in his own write!

Perhaps I should get back to my point: that those who worry we live in an illiterate age should seize the tools available to them, one of those being television. There is no tenure to be had here, no grants or guarantees, but there is a new future in specialized, narrowcast, digital, and ultimately interactive TV. I cannot do it all myself because, quite frankly, running a book channel totally gets in the way of my reading, so I appeal to you to get down out of your ivory towers and contribute to the cause in a language the masses – on whose behalf you express so much concern – can understand. As a matter of fact you already have, just by being here, for the TV cameras you see in this hall belong to Canadian Learning Television, our sister station, and in a few months thirteen Living Literacies programs will air there and on Book Television. Which is, at least, a start.