Page 133 - Literacy in the New Media Age

122 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

material manifestations they have – just as other frames have material
manifestations.
What is framed can be linked, and linking can take many forms, from the simple
act of placing one element next to another, to the much more complex act of
integrating elements either of the same kind or of different kinds into each other.
This is one task of punctuation, for instance in the very simple act of putting
commas between items in a list, or the slightly more complex act of inserting one
element (such as here) into another element. That act has many versions,
concretely and more abstractly. Punctuations in that sense enable us both to
produce, and to ratify and fix, conceptual arrangements of great complexity.
In a multimodal theory of literacy we need to be able to deal with textual
entities which are constituted in several modes. In the chapter I deal with the
interrelations of the modes of speech and writing, and across the modes of
writing and image also. Many textual entities are now constituted in two or more
modes. In a CD-ROM writing can occur with still or moving image, with speech,
with soundtrack, with music. All these bring their meaning to the whole textual
ensemble, and so have their effect on what writing is and what it does. This
poses some new problems, though in principle these should be accommodated in
the one theory.
What meanings does the system of punctuation allow us to produce? Can
punctuation be thought and talked about meaningfully other than as an integral
part of all the structuring systems of speech, of writing and of all other modes
which occur on pages and screens? A much newer question now is, ‘How does
punctuation fit into a multimodal theory of literacy?’ Framing marks off, but in
doing so it establishes, at the same time, the elements which may be joined. A
social semiotic approach to representation and communication sees all modes as
meaning-making systems, all of which are integrally connected with social and
cultural systems. The multiple and often contradictory logics of multimodal texts
can be explained plausibly and satisfactorily only by bringing them into an
integral relation with the logics of other social and cultural systems. And so I
attempt to see punctuation as one among many devices for making meanings in
the contradictory world of social and cultural matters.

Text as the domain of punctuation

Some sixteen years after that first unpleasant encounter, I came back to the
question of punctuation in quite a new context. In the meantime I had come to
know just how culturally shaped punctuation is and all sorts of framings are. I
had come to understand that the framings of writing that I had absorbed as part
of learning to speak and write German, as my first language, differed hugely
from the framings of English. Sentences which stretch over three or four or five
lines of a page, and paragraphs which go for a page and more, are not really
favoured in English. It was that felt sense of the meaning of punctuation which I
brought to an attempt to understand how children grapple with the difficult