Page 122 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND GENRE 111

ordered actions or events which are like actions or events in the everyday world.
‘Doing science’ in the drawing/diagram is presented as being about another
world, not one of actions and events, but of states of affairs with regularities,
abstracted away from the everyday world. If this multimodal text-entity ‘has’ a
genre, then it is a mixed genre, in which differently organised worlds appear
differently: one a world of actions where the actors are like you and me, the
other a world without actors, a world of things as they are. If one is the world of
the everyday, then the other is the world of theory, abstraction. One draws me in
by suggesting that I am like the actors in a world that is familiar to me. The other
positions me as a neutral observer of an objectively present world, but an
observer with a special status and a special lens.
This is the meaning of this genre; these are the social relations and the social
roles of the participants projected by the combined genre. Of course, this is a genre
produced by a non-expert. The fact that she mixes the social relations of the
world of the everyday with the social relations of the world of scientific work
may be an effect of the teaching that she has had, or it may be her response to
what she has taken from that teaching. She is able to form her own generic
response, to see science her way and to represent it her way: actions which are
like those of the everyday, in relation to a world which is differently constituted.
The genre overall seems to position her somewhere between the everyday and
the special world of technical/theoretical endeavour.
Mixed genres are commonplace, though the kind of disjunction presented here
would appear as a severe problem if both texts were written texts, or if this was
the text of an expert. Because the two generic positions are realised in different
modes, the disjunction is not readily apparent, or does not become a problem; it
does not appear as a contradiction. In fact it may well be a very good
representation of the social relations as they exist in the science teaching that she
is experiencing. Is it a problem that we do not have labels for these ‘mixes’, or
indeed do not have labels for many kinds of generic organisation? This is not, I
think, the main issue at all; if we find that we need labels, we will make them up.
What is important is to recognise that texts realise, among other things, the kinds
of social relation pointed to here.
In this text too we see design at work. This young woman has made a number
of design decisions in a multimodal representation: a decision about layout, in
where to place which element; a decision about generic (epistemological) form –
everyday or scientific – for each of the two elements; a decision about which
mode to use for the realisation of each of the distinct positions; and no doubt
others.
As far as labels for the mixes are concerned, my analysis of the next example
(Figure 7.2) will show that this may be even less of a useful aim.
Several differences are immediately apparent. The ‘diagram’ (with the
teacher’s written comment, ‘Diagram needs to be much larger’) is below the
written text, as the teacher had asked. There is a division between the
written part and the visual; they are separated by a heading – ‘what we saw’. But