Page 15 - Literacy in the New Media Age

4 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

dissolved and the sun rose’ has a quite different meaning, a near mystical force
compared to the mundane ‘the sun rose and the mists dissolved’. But the
affordance which is at issue here is that of temporal sequence, and its effects are
to orient us towards causality, whether in a simple clause (‘the sun dissolved the
mists’), where an agent acts and causes an effect, or in the conjoined clauses just
above. The simple yet profound fact of sequence in time orients us towards a
world of causality.
Reading paths may exist in images, either because the maker of the image
structured that into the image – and it is read as it is or it is transformed by the
reader, or they may exist because they are constructed by the reader without
prior construction by the maker of the image. The means for doing this rest, as
with writing, with the affordances of the mode. The logic of space and of spatial
display provides the means; making an element central and other elements
marginal will encourage the reader to move from the centre to the margin.
Making some elements salient through some means – size, colour, shape, for
instance – and others less salient again encourages a reading path. However, I
say ‘encourages’ rather than ‘compels’ as I did with writing. Reading the
elements of an image ‘out of order’ is easy or at least possible; it is truly difficult
in writing.
However, while the reading path in the image is (relatively) open, the image
itself and its elements are filled with meaning. There is no vagueness, no
emptiness here. That which is meant to be represented is represented. Images are
plain full with meaning, whereas words wait to be filled. Reading paths in
writing (as in speech) are set with very little or no leeway; in the image they are
open. That is the contrast in affordance of the two modes: in writing, relatively
vacuous elements in strict order (in speech also, to a somewhat lesser extent);
and full elements in a (relatively) open order in image. The imaginative work in
writing focuses on filling words with meaning – and then reading the filled
elements together, in the given syntactic structure. In image, imagination focuses
on creating the order of the arrangement of elements which are already filled
with meaning.
This is one answer to the cultural pessimists: focus on what each mode makes
available, and use that as the starting point for a debate. There is then the further
question of whether in the move from the dominance of one mode to the other
there are losses – actually and potentially – which we would wish to avoid. On
the one hand, the work of imagination called forth by writing – even in the
limited way I have discussed it here (and the kinds of imaginative work and the
potential epistemological losses I have suggested – the loss of an underlying
orientation towards cause as one instance) may make us try to preserve features
of writing which might otherwise disappear. On the other hand, I may actually
not want to live in a semiotic/cultural world where everything is constructed in
causal ways, whether I want it or no t– as just one example. I will return to the
question both of affordances and of gains and losses in other places in the book.