Page 125 - Literacy in the New Media Age

114 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

whole? Like her fellow students, this young woman saw air-bubbles, larger and
smaller ones. However, the cell-entities which she saw are far less regular in
shape, and their arrangement is not in any way as orderly as in the ‘brick wall’
example. Regularity of the elements or of their arrangements is not a feature of
this image. The drawing differs from that in the first example in that what it
shows is complete: here we have the whole world that is to be represented. The
implication is that this is what she actually saw through the microscope:
everything that was there to see is there, as she saw it. It is textually as well as
representationally complete.
In the drawing in the first example scientificness lay in abstraction away from
that which appeared in view in the microscope, abstraction in the direction of
theory and generalisation. There was no representation of the lens of the
microscope, and in fact no real pretence that the drawing represented what the
‘eye’ had seen. That drawing represented what the ‘eye of theory’ had seen.
Here, by contrast, scientificness lies in the precision of representing that which is
there in view, that which the human eye can see. In the first example truth is the
truth of abstraction, the truth of theory; here truth is the truth of actuality, of that
which is there, the truth of the empirically real world. We are shown not only what
she saw, but the means by which she saw what she saw, hence we see the
eyepiece through which the young woman looked – we see everything that she
saw. For her, being scientific resides in the accuracy of observation and
representation.
The relation of the written text and the image is inverted in relation to that in
the first example. There the written text was broadly realistic and the visual
broadly non-realistic, theoretical. Here the written text is not an account of
events as they happened, but of a schema as it exists in the world of science,
which might lead to a set of actions in that world. The visual part, by contrast, is
realistic. The two aspects of the text jointly seem to suggest that the meaning of
‘scientificness’ here might be that the world of science is ordered by schemata for
action which organise and underlie action, and that the essential task of science
is to achieve an accurate account of the empirically real, aided by these schemata
of actions.
If we contrast the two examples, they are nearly an inversion of each other: in
the first, the written part of the text is realist; in the second it is schematic/
theoretical; in the first text, the visual part is theoretical/abstract, while in the
second it is empirical/realist. Scientificness is carried in distinctively different
ways in the two cases. Underlying this is the action and the process of design of
an overall message-entity.
What is the role of writing in these multimodal ensembles? Even though the
written parts of the two ensembles are generically different from each other, they
do share a significantly common feature: both are focused on action and event,
even if differently so; both of the visual elements by contrast are focused on
‘what is’, the visual display of the world that is in focus. Each of the two texts
overall is incomplete without both written and visual parts; each mode, writing