Page 121 - Literacy in the New Media Age

110 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

positioning is neither to the side – which would indicate lesser involvement, nor
is the viewer below or above the element shown, something that would indicate
difference in power. The entity is presented to the viewer in a maximally neutral
manner: it is simply ‘there’, objectively. Instead of the relations of ‘recounter’
and ‘recountee’ of that which is ‘recounted’, we have the relation of ‘displayer’
and ‘viewer’ of that which is ‘displayed’.
At this stage we would need to look back at the written recount and attempt an
assessment of kinds of involvement there. We can, however, make comments on
the third level, the relation between the world of practices represented here and
that of the everyday world. The mode of drawing is not a realist one: it is
generalised away from everyday realism, both through the means of using the
soft black pencil on the white page (rather than the use of colour, as in one of the
other pieces of work) and the abstracting, diagrammatic form of representation.
The former tells us that certain aspects of the everyday world, such as the colour
of the viewed entity, are not relevant here, and similarly with other aspects, such
as the actual, ‘real’ boundaries of the object. These all provide pointers to the
kind of social world into which we are invited. ‘Diagram’ is closer to serving as
a genre-label, in that it suggests both a particular social purpose, and social
relations, of those who use the diagram and those who make it. ‘Diagram’ also
suggests a particular coding-orientation: not the realism of the everyday world,
but the realism of the scientific-technological world.

Meanings of genres in multimodal texts
So what is the genre of this text overall? And what consequences does all this
have not just for a view of writing, but for the actual uses of writing, and for
likely changes to the uses, forms and values of the technology of writing?
To answer the first question, we can say that there is a clear difference
between the ‘naturalism’ (within the realism of everyday life) of the written
genre of recount, and the abstraction (within the world of scientific theorising) of
the visual genre of diagram-drawing. The first positions me as someone who
hears an account of a completed, ordered, sequence of events, recounted as
though they form part of my everyday life. That sense is reinforced by the syntax
of the writing, which is close to the clausal structures of everyday speech, as is
its use of words – ‘we then sorted the microscope out’ from a quite casual
register. Doing science, in this account, is like doing cooking, or doing the
dishes. The second form, the visual, positions me as someone who is given a
view of a fragment of an entity, but understands that the fragment ‘stands for’ the
structure of the whole entity, in a form which is not part of the everyday world. I
am positioned in a different domain, out of time, in a world of regularity
produced by the theory that I am applying.
The task of the science curriculum is, still, to induct young people into the
practices that constitute ‘doing science’. That practice is presented in
two distinct ways here: ‘doing science’ in the recount presents me with a world of