Page 117 - Literacy in the New Media Age

106 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

speech or of writing? We can make the question quite specific and ask, how do
images represent social relations and social interactions?
The materiality of the different modes – sound for speech, light for image,
body for dance – means that not everything can be realised in every mode with
equal facility, and that we cannot transport mode-specific theories from one
mode to another without producing severe distortions. This is somewhat difficult
to express clearly, because I want to say that meanings, in the broad sense, can
be realised in any mode, but that when they are, they are realised in mode-
specific articulations. This means that we need to attend to that which is mode-
specific and to that which is not. Our past understanding of meaning has not
raised that question, and therefore our attention does not go in that direction.
Rather we have been told that that which is meant is realised, and that that which
is realised is that which has been meant. Instead we need to understand that
meaning is articulated in this way in a specific mode, and in this other way in
another mode. From here we have questions which go on the one hand in the
direction of ‘meaning’, loosely speaking, and on the other hand in the direction of
theory. From the point of view of meaning the question is, what is the meaning to
be realised? From the point of view of theory one question is, what are the
affordances of different modes, and how do different modes therefore realise
meanings of a certain kind? The other is about genre as a category: is it a mode-
specific category or not?
The question about the social meaning is readily answered: it is not possible to
imagine communication which does not encompass the meanings realised in
genre. That is, no message or text is conceivable which does not respond to such
social facts. Hence all representation and communication must be generically
shaped; it must carry these social meanings. ‘Meaning’ is inevitably and
necessarily realised differently in different modes. And so the question here is,
what is our sense of the social givens realised in genre, and how will they appear
in this modal articulation? Does the category of genre remain important, useful,
necessary; does it become more or less important in the era of multimodal
communication? The answer is that the category of genre is essential in all
attempts to understand text, whatever its modal constitution. The point is to
develop a theory and terms adequate to that.
The question is, what is it that we want to mean, and what modes and genres
are best for realising that meaning? That leads us to the social givens which we
want to realise in a genre, and a question more like, what social, representational
and communicative function do genres have? I will return to this throughout this
discussion, but here I wish to make this concrete by looking at two texts.
The texts are entirely usual. They come from a science classroom in a
secondary school in inner-city London. The children in this class are in year 8,
which means that they are 12 to 13 years of age. The series of lessons in which
the texts were produced had as its topic ‘plant cells’. Four children – all girls –
had worked together in a group around a microscope, first preparing a slide with
a piece of the epidermis of an onion, then looking at this slide through a