Page 127 - Literacy in the New Media Age

116 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

nothing to do with the existence of the new information and communication
media. In reality they absolutely do: the manner in which these young people
encounter school science owes much to the revolution in representation which
has already in their world altered the status, the function, the uses and the forms
of writing. The ‘books’ which they use are transformed already by the joint
effects of the emergence into central representational use of the mode of image,
and the effect on the page of the organisations of the screens of the new media.
The fact that there is now a design decision to be made, and that decisions about
genre are now relatively open, is both a direct effect of the new media via their
effect on the look of the page, and also an indirect effect of the new media in that
teachers as much as designers of textbooks know that the young are attuned to a
differently configured communicational world.
In that new communicational world there are now choices about how what is
to be represented should be represented: in what mode, in what genre, in what
ensembles of modes and genres and on what occasions. These were not decisions
open to students (or teachers or textbook-makers) some twenty years earlier. Of
course, with all this go questions not only of the potentials of the resources, but also
of the new possibilities of arrangements, the new grammars of multimodal texts.
These new grammars, barely coming into conventionality at the moment, and
certainly very little understood, have effects in two ways at least. On the one
hand they order the arrangements of the elements in the ensembles; on the other
hand they design the functions that the different elements are to have in the
ensembles. These are the kinds of decision that I pointed to: writing used for the
representation of event structures, and image used for the representations of
displays of aspects of the world. This is what I call the ‘functional specialisation’
of the modes, and that in turn has the profoundest effects on the inner
organisation and development of the modes.
Where before, up until twenty or thirty years ago, writing carried all the
communicational load of a message, and needed to have grammatical and
syntactic structures that were equal to the complexities of that which had to be
represented in that single mode, now there is a specialisation, which allows each
of the modes to carry that part of the message for which it is best equipped. This
brings with it the possibilities of great simplification of syntax for writing, for
instance. It leads to some new questions, such as I have mentioned: what are the
elements which come together in the multimodal ensembles? In the two text
examples discussed above, there are image blocks and writing blocks, and it is
these which form the first level of conjunction. At the first level of reading we
note that the text is composed of ‘blocks’, and at that level it is not immediately
relevant what modal realisation these elements have, whether they are image or
writing. They are treated as elements of the same order. This is a bit like the
analysis of a sentence where we might want to know what the main verb is, what
its subject noun might be, and what complements – if any – there are. Reading at
the next level down would then focus on the internal elements of these higher-
level elements.