Page 148 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MEANING AND FRAMES 137

literacy). The significant point – and one which I stress in Chapter 9 – is that
‘reading’ is now a distinctly different activity to what it was in the era of the
traditional page. Reading is the imposing of the reader’s order on this entity, an
order which, while of course responding to what is here, derives from criteria of
the reader’s interest, disposition and desire. This is reading as ordering. Even
when I have decided to enter via a category on the menu, it is my choice which
category I choose to enter.
At this point I do not wish to analyse the individual elements further – just as I
did not do so in the case of clauses. But the principles and criteria of framing are
worth reflecting on, as is the effect of this framing/punctuation. Taking the
central large ‘band’ as an example, it brings together two distinct elements: the
spatially/visually large element of image and writing, and the smaller, though
functionally large element, the list of categories making up the menu. The latter
opens the path to specific information, responding to the visitor’s needs and
wishes. It is on the left, the space of the given: that which we take for granted.
Information readily classified, and ease of access to information, is here the
taken-for-granted starting point of website communication. It has a specific
purpose – whether that is booking my plane ticket or, as here, entering on a
career in higher education – and that is the (very large) ‘new’, that which is to be
achieved. The framing brings together ‘means’ – the information, and ‘ends’ –
the desired goal, in one single new semiotic entity. Just as with some of the
framings in the written instances, the fact that what is brought together is
categorically unequal disappears; the new semiotic entity makes its own new
semiotic-social sense.
It may be worth pointing out that all this is very much part of a transitional
era: when I click on ‘contact IoE’ I am more or less back to a traditional page,
with its organisation, as indeed I am, even more so, when I click on ‘more about
IoE’.
The instance from the CD-ROM that I discuss here (Figure 8.3) presents a
screen of a different kind. It looks entirely conventional: two blocks, an image-
block and a writing-block themselves framed, in the original, in a background of
blue.
The unusual – and less conventional – feature here is that the image is on the
left, and the writing on the right. We start with the image as given – it is the
taken-for-granted mode of communication – and writing has an ancillary
function, namely of glossing what the image does. The framing produces that as
the unit: a merged element of image-writing, with image as the taken-for-granted
mode, and writing as the subsidiary mode which glosses the meaning of image.
In this case it is useful to move to the next level down. It is here that we get a
further insight into what is being framed. The image is ‘typical’ of a
particular aspect of filmic practice – backlighting in this case. The written text is
conventionally academic in its form. It seems that the new medium is being used
partially to achieve something new – this conjunction (though that could be done
on the page also) – and something conventional, keeping the text as a whole