Defining literacy in the 21st century. (An Advertising Supplement to the Los Angeles Business Journal: Education).

For the better part of the last millennium, comprehension and expression in the printed medium defined what it meant to be literate. Over the course of the past two decades, however, digital technology has proliferated throughout nearly every aspect of our society -- from entertainment, to communications, to healthcare, to education -- bringing with it an influx of multimedia applications that radically alter what it will mean to be literate in this century and beyond.

Changing Standards

America has been no stranger to "education revolutions," a fact borne out by the billions of dollars that federal, state and local governments have spent to boost academic performance. While there have been success stories, statistics also chart stagnation and even lapses in how well the traditional system has prepared its people to meet the challenges of a modern society.

According to results from the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (the most recent data available), between 21 and 23 percent of the adult population scored in Level 1 of the test, meaning some 44 million people could not read well enough to fill out an application, decipher a food label, or read a simple story to a child. Another 25 to 28 percent of the adult population -- roughly 45 to 50 million people -- scored in Level 2, which meant they could perform more complex tasks such as comparing, contrasting or integrating pieces of information, but they usually did not possess higher-level reading and problem-solving skills.

Likewise, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has gauged the performance of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in mathematics, reading and science since 1971, also painted a less than stellar portrait of education in America. On the plus side, mathematics scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds noted steady increases since 1973, and reading results showed the performance of 9-and 13-year-olds was higher in 1999 than in 1971. That said, the findings also demonstrated that there was no meaningful difference among 17-year-olds in terms of reading performance, while science performance for all age groups declined during the 1970s, then increased during the 1980s and early 1990s, only to settle into a stable pattern since then.

Such trends have compelled elected officials, educators and researchers alike to reflect on what needs to be done to put America's education system on track. Looking for solutions, many schools around the nation are going "back to the basics," placing an intense emphasis on prepping students through rote learning in order to pass standardized tests.

Though many see this as the key to jump-starting our educational process, the real answer lies not in simply returning to a model that has yielded unimpressive results, but rather in forging a new type of learning, one that harnesses our innate curiosity, interest and sense of participation and fuels the desire to learn more.

The Case for Multimedia

The old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" still rings true, as Yale professor Edward Tufte underscores in Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.

Tufte juxtaposes two instances in which transforming standard text into a visual representations meant the difference between life and death. In 1854, Dr. John Snow took a list of fatalities from a cholera epidemic, plotted them on a map of London, traced the outbreak's roots to a single contaminated well and halted the spreading illness before it overwhelmed the city. Conversely, in 1986, the failure of rocket designers to translate raw data into images that would demonstrate the impending failure of the space shuttle Challenger's O-rings led to one of NASA's darkest moments.

Now, if relatively simple graphics yielded such results, imagine what would happen if you took flat text and statistics and invigorated them with moving images, audio segments, hypertext, and database material. By employing multimedia techniques, we can present, visualize and comprehend information in ways never before possible.

In addition to these attributes, the rise of multimedia applications also melds perfectly with the groundswell of popular interest in digitally disseminated information that we have witnessed over the past few years.

Numerous surveys testify to the depth and breadth of this movement. The most recent U.S. census reported that the ratio of school-age children (6- to 17-years-old) who had access to a computer in 2000 was 9 in 10. These same data also noted that in 2000, more than 4 in 5 households with computers had at least one member using the Internet at home. (Three years earlier, that ratio was less than half.) Home entertainment illustrates similar developments, with some 46 percent of all U.S. households surveyed by the Interactive Digital Software Association in 2000 reporting that they owned at least one video game console. These statistics and others amply indicate how intensely today's society is steeped in computer-based technology, how well versed we are in working with it, and how readily we assimilate its fast-paced changes.

A Philosophy, Not a Tool'

If multimedia technology is truly going to be the basis of a new literacy, one of the pivotal factors that we must understand from the outset is that the movement is not about just providing jazzy digital tools and generating glitzy presentations. If we are to capitalize on a unique opportunity to reshape our processes for research, instruction and communication, then it is imperative that we look well beyond the hardware and the software and devise an entirely new canon of critical thought on multimedia use and its impact.

Work has already started on this, with scholars and theorists around the nation probing how multimedia applications will affect the learning process from kindergarten to college and beyond. Successes and failures undoubtedly lie ahead, but the promise of combining technological advances 'Nith carefully reasoned critical analysis bodes well for a truly new multimedia literacy -- "or language of screens" -- to evolve now and for the generations to come.

Elizabeth M. Daley is the executive director of the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, which researches the impact of digital technology on society through initiatives such as its Multimedia Literacy Program. Daley is also dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television.