Page 150 - Literacy in the New Media Age

9
READING AS SEMIOSIS
Interpreting the world and ordering the world

From telling the world to showing the world

The current landscape of communication can be characterised by the metaphor
of the move from telling the world to showing the world. The metaphor points to
a profound change in the act of reading, which can be characterised by the
phrases ‘reading as interpreting’ and ‘reading as ordering’. The metaphor and the
two phrases allow us to explore the questions that reading poses – narrowly as
‘getting meaning from a written text’, and widely as ‘making sense of the world
around me’ – through a new lens. Both senses of reading rest on the idea of
reading as sign-making. The signs that are made by readers in their reading draw
on what there is to be read. They draw on the shape of the cultural world of
representation, and on the reader’s prior training in how and what to read. New
forms of reading, when texts show the world rather than tell the world have
consequences for the relations between makers and remakers of meaning (writers
and readers, image-makers and viewers). In this it is important to focus on
materiality, on the materiality of the bodily senses that are engaged in reading –
hearing (as in speech), sight (as in reading and viewing), touch (as in the feel of
Braille) – and on the materiality of the means for making the representations that
are to be ‘read’ – graphic stuff such as letters or ideograms, sound as in speech,
movement as in gesture.
Some things are common to ‘reading’ across time, across cultures, across
space, namely those which derive from the way in which our bodies place us in
the world, ranging from the physiology of vision to the structure of the organs
which we use for speech and hearing, to the organisation of the brain and its
inherent capacities for memory, for instance. At the same time, many things are
not common across cultures, times, places. Some things which seem part of our
‘nature’ are shaped by culture in important ways, such as the training of memory
for instance. Forms of learning may have as much to do with human culture as
with human nature. Above all, the shape of what there is to read has its effects
on ‘reading’. Reading practices, and the understanding of what reading is,