Page 146 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MEANING AND FRAMES 135

Framing in multimodal texts: writing and image
The modes of speech and writing are closely linked at three ‘points’ at least – at
the levels of the letter, the word and the clause. This makes one problem of this
cross-mode framing less difficult in that some of the crucial elements are quite
similar, semiotically: in ‘size’, in function, in structural potentials. This is not the
same in links across modes such as image and writing, to focus on that nearest to
hand. This is why I proposed the notion of the ‘block’, which has a uniform
function (and structural meaning) across occasions and sites, irrespective of its
content. In discussing this I will make use of two examples, one the homepage of
the institution where I work (Figure 8.2), the other from a CD-ROM produced by
a member of an MA class in educational design at the Institute of Education.
In asking about the conjunction through framing of elements from the two
modes of writing and image, we immediately encounter a problem. How do we
read this page (Figure 8.2)? We might take as one possible route the notion of
‘entry’: there are several ways of entering this page. However, the moment we
have chosen ‘entry’ as a principle of approach, we realise that we have made the
decision not to treat this as a (conventional) page at all: with a page there is no
question of ‘entry’. That matter had been settled by conventions of the traditional
printed page, so much so that the question could not arise, it had become
naturalised. My approach in fact means that I have chosen to treat this as a new
semiotic entity, a ‘screen’. ‘Screens’ have points of entry; traditional pages do not.
Or maybe the better way to put this is to say that in screens the point of entry is a
problematic issue, whereas for the traditional page it was not. The ‘point of entry’
for the page is so much a part of conventions that it has ceased to be visible.
Here, however, in relation to the IoE ‘homepage’, there is no principle by which
we could treat and read this as a (conventional/traditional) page. By contrast, the
page from the science textbook in Chapter 9 (Figure 9.7), does offer the
possibility of being treated as a page. It could be ‘read’, in part at least, even if
not very successfully, as a ‘traditional page’: we could start at the top left corner
of one of its columns, and read on across and down. It could also be read as a
‘new’ page, where we might start the reading by focusing on the images and
seeing writing as having an ancillary function.
Here there is no such possibility. The screen is organised on the principles of
the logic of the visual: there are graphic blocks, in particular kinds of
arrangement. There is, it is true, the functionally derived organisation of the
screen, in terms of points of entry, and inevitably the two interact. Reading this
as a visual entity we will need to attend to the visual arrangement, much as we
might approach a modernist painting. There are four blocks. Two of these form
framing bands horizontally at the top and at the bottom of the screen; each of
these has internal structuring, at the next level ‘down’, so to speak. The two
framing bands are separated by ‘white space’, forming a frame between the
bands and the rest of the screen. This produces a rectangular space in the centre.
The central space consists of two elements or blocks: the ‘menu’, so called, on