Page 126 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND GENRE 115

and image, does distinctly different and specific things. The specificity is the
same at one level: the affordance of the logic of time governs writing, and the
affordance of the logic of space governs the image. Within that, there is the
possibility of generic variation. And the generic variation of the ensembles, in
each case, produce an overall difference of a significant kind.

Genre as design: text and the new media
As I suggested, the two texts that I have discussed here – as well as the
Annapelle text earlier – are examples of ensembles of modes, brought together to
realise particular meanings. The fact that the two school-texts are made by
unpractised designers is in one way an advantage in that it shows how an
untutored maker of such ensembles uses the affordances of the modes for their
ends. The purpose of the science curriculum is, in one important way, to induct
young people into the idea of scientificness. Here we see the response of two
students to this demand, expressed through what we can see as design decisions
in the realisation of that meaning. They are faced with the question of ‘what is it
to act or be scientific?’ and each gives a distinct answer, which is expressed
through choice of modes, and choice of genres, more than through what aspects
of curriculum content to represent. Both students understand the affordances of
writing – best of all it does the job of representing action and event – though of
course the teacher’s demands and previously encountered models will have given
them resources in that respect. The teacher’s inexplicit or ‘open’ framing of the
task leaves much of the design decision to the students: how to interpret the
relatively open request ‘write what you did’ in generically specific terms, and to
do the same for the request ‘draw what you saw’.
The first of the two examples shows a decision to go for realism in the written
genre: to be truthful to science means that I am expected to report things as they
were; I have to stay true to the empirically real. But this student also realised that
science is about constructing general accounts of what this aspect of the world is
(like), and she does that in her drawing: the truth of this world lies in this
abstraction, which generalises away from the messiness of the empirical and to a
general truth. The truth of actions is reached via the mode of writing, and the
truth of how the world looks is reached via the mode of image.
For the second student there is a similar question, though she answers it
differently: the truth of science lies in the generality of the procedures, in the
generality of the practices, which must be the same each time they are performed
and not open to the chance of contingent event. This truth is reached via the
mode of writing. The truth of what the world is like is reached via the mode of
image and the precise recording of what there actually is in that world, without
concession to anything but strict observation.
These are epistemological decisions, but they are realised through design
decisions focused on the use of modes and the truth they harbour, the use of
genres and the truths that they contain. On the face of it, these decisions have