Page 120 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND GENRE 109

‘practices in the everyday world may be different to the way they are narrated
here’.)
The social roles and relations established and implied by the genre of recount
as message (that is, genre oriented towards communication) are, if I am
presenting the recount, those of ‘recounter’ – I am someone who knows that
which is being recounted – and ‘recountee’ – you are someone whom I regard as
wishing to have the events recounted to you. If I am receiving the recount, the
roles are those of myself being someone who is interested in having these events
recounted to me, in being the ‘recountee’, and accepting you as the ‘recounter’.
The recount presents a world of action/event, temporally ordered and complete.
In asking about the generic form of the drawing, we bump up against a
problem: there are no genre-terms for describing what this drawing is or does,
either in terms of the presentation of material – the content – or of its
representation of the social relations between the ‘participants’ in the production
and reproduction of the text, the participants in the communicational event. What
are these relations, as they are realised in the drawing, as they appear here? (To
some extent what appears here will become clearer by comparison with the next
example.) In answering this I will make use of the same types of relation as I
used just above. First, what is shown ‘in’ the drawing (analogous to what is
shown ‘in’ the recount) and by the drawing as a whole? The drawing shows a
rectangular block with clearly distinct elements within it. The block is strongly
framed along the top and the bottom, but is ‘open’ at each end, suggesting that it
is ‘a part of’, ‘an extract from’, ‘a fragment of’ a larger entity. This suggests that
while the drawing is not textually complete, it is conceptually complete: any
other part of the larger entity of which this is a fragment will also be like this
fragment. The elements themselves are drawn as being broadly uniform in shape
and size. One of the handouts used in the lead-up lessons had suggested to the
students that they would see something resembling ‘bricks in a brickwall’, and
quite clearly that metaphor has guided this student’s ‘seeing’. On the left-most
edge there is a large ‘irregularity’ – the circular shape – and there are small
bubble-like elements within the bricks.
This is a structure of relatively uniform elements in regular arrangement: the
blocks are arranged in even layers, arranged regularly. While the recount
presents a world of happenings, of actions or events, what is displayed here is a
world of entities as they are: static, stable, regular elements in regular
arrangement. While the world of the recount is complete in that it represents all
there is to recount, the world of this display is complete in that it represents all
there is to know – to show more would be to show more of the same, and while
the world of the recount is set in time and is completed – it has happened – the
world of this display is out of time – it just is – and it is complete in being.
The relation between the participants in the act of communication is an
‘objective’ one. The viewer is presented with this text-element ‘front on’. It is
objectively there, with maximal ‘involvement’ of the viewer, that is, the
viewer is positioned as confronting this image straight on, at eye-level. The