Page 151 - Literacy in the New Media Age

140 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

develop in the constant interaction between the shape of what there is to read and
the socially located reader and their human nature.
Immediately, there are the differences between alphabetic writing and
logographic or pictographic writing: the one orienting readers towards sound, the
other towards meaning. Script systems range from those which attempt to
represent sounds graphically as letters, as the alphabet does, to those which
attempt to represent meaning as images, as do, in various forms, logographic and
pictographic scripts. Even within alphabetic writing there are deep differences in
the use of ‘lettered representation’ over different periods and in different cultures.
As it happens, we are in a period where vast changes are taking place in this
respect. In the Western, alphabetically oriented world, the change is one where
image is ever more insistently appearing with or even instead of writing.
No one theory can deal with everything necessary for a full understanding of
‘reading’. In my approach, a semiotic one, I focus on the ‘how’, the ‘what with’
and the ‘why’ of representation and communication: how, in what way, with
what material and cultural resources, do we make the signs that represent our
interests? That focus is one slice of the pie, so to speak. Ethnographers of writing
and reading want to know where and when and for what purposes reading
happens; what the environments are and look like in which reading happens.
Researchers coming from media sociology want to know the shape of the whole
media-field in which reading and the book have their contemporary uses and
functions, a place in which ‘reading’ vies with all other media for the user’s
time, energy and attention. Closely related are the interests of those who ask
about power, about exclusions and inclusions, and about domination through
texts. Others ask about reading from the point of view of leisure and pleasure:
given that there is such a vast range of media, what uses are being made of
reading for entertainment, for fun, for relaxation, but also for ostensibly more
serious purposes? Yet others ask questions which come from phonetics and
phonology; yet others focus on more strictly psychological issues such as
memory, recognition, retention and so on.
My own starting point is this: the increasingly and insistently more
multimodal forms of contemporary texts make it essential to rethink our notions
of what reading is. As I have been demonstrating so far, many contemporary
texts make use of image and of writing at the same time, using both to carry
meaning in specific ways. In that context, a theory of reading which relates to the
graphic material of ‘letters’ alone is no longer able to explain how we derive
meaning from texts. At that point we are faced with a choice: either we treat
‘reading’ as a process which extends beyond (alphabetic) writing, and includes
images for instance; or we restrict ‘reading’ to the mode of alphabetic writing
quite strictly, and attend separately to how meaning is derived from images.
Even then we would still need a theory which tells us how to combine meaning
derived from writing and from image into a single coherent entity. And that
would leave the question which I have raised earlier, of whether ideas of