Page 124 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND GENRE 113

that there might be those who would wish to reproduce those actions. Here there
are those with the power or authority to order actions to be taken, and those who
carry out the actions. This is very different to the recount. It is no longer the
friendly telling of what happened so that you might do the same; this is being
told what to do. The claim made implicitly in the procedure is one of relations of
power, actions and intended outcomes. This is not a realist genre in the manner
of the recount; it is not a report of real events or actions of actual people, of
events which have happened. It is a set of commands (in the syntactic form of
imperatives) for actions that are to happen.
As in the first example, the written text-part is generically complete. Its
relation to the world of the everyday is different; it is not the world of everyday
happenings. This is a world in which power exists, and those with power can
insist on actions being taken in a specific way and in a certain sequence. These
are social relations of a very different kind. In the recount we could be sure that
all the significant events were there, even though there might also be others. For
instance, in the recount we are told that ‘it was interesting to look at and draw’.
In the procedure we have only those potential actions (as commands) which are
essential to the carrying out of a task which already exists as a prestructured
schema.
In terms of communicational roles, there is a big difference: the text overall is
a set of instructions, and the individual segments are commands to carry out the
instructions as they are indicated. Consequently, the roles here are of a different
kind: to act in a world in accord with the commands of some other with power, with
clear procedures and in accordance with those procedures. The reader is not in
the world of their everyday life. My role is to carry out commands issued by some
(institutional) authority.
That also describes the relation between the world of this written text and the
everyday world: they are different. In this world I have less power than others.
The manner in which I am drawn into the text is by command, by means of
power, and not as before, by the pleasure or interest of the recount. The world
projected here is the world of precise procedures which those who are a part of
this world must follow. It is not the everyday world of these students: there is no
(implicit) claim here that the world of scientific practices is like the world of
their everyday practices.
The drawing differs from that in the first example. One clue is provided in the
instructions: ‘Search for pattern like a honeycomb’. In his talk the teacher had
provided the metaphor, among others, of the honeycomb: ‘it might look like a
honeycomb’. In the case of both texts a metaphor provided in language – in
writing in the one instance – ‘what you will see will be like bricks in a brick
wall’ – and in talk in the other – has been transducted by the pupils into visual
form. Let me follow the steps that I took in analysing both the written and the
visual elements of the first example. The drawing shows a strongly delineated
circle, with elements of different kinds contained in the circle. What is
represented ‘in’ the image, and what is represented by the image overall, as a