Page 153 - Literacy in the New Media Age

142 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

silent’, or ‘the letter a is pronounced as ai when there is an e on the end of the
word, as in lame’.
‘Reading’ needs either to be discussed overtly as the general human urge and
capacity for deriving meanings from (culturally) shaped materials which are
thought to be the bearers of meaning; or to be treated as a culturally and historically
specific instance of that general capacity. In other words, I do not think it is
possible to deal with ‘reading-as-such’ in any useful fashion. It is possible to talk
about the general human capacities that are involved, both physiological and
semiotic, and it is possible to attempt to describe how these capacities are shaped
at a particular point in the history of a society in relation to the shape of what
there is to be read. In this chapter I will make some comments about both: I will
attempt to say something about the general semiotic principles involved, and
about the shape of ‘what is to be read’ in my society at this point, and how that
makes us think about ‘reading’, now. I will deal with the former by focusing on
‘reading as sign-making’, and with the latter by asking, ‘what is characteristic
about writing using the roman alphabet?’ Because this moment in time is
different, in the ways I have already indicated several times, I will also focus on
new forms of reading of new forms of text.

Reading as sign-making

Let me begin with a very simple example. I have discussed it before (Kress,
1997a), but it will help here to develop a sufficiently rich account of ‘sign’, and
of reading.
The context in which the sign was produced was, roughly, this. I was sitting in
my study, working, and our then 3-year-old daughter was sitting on the floor,
‘doing her work’, in this case attempting to write a thank-you card to a friend.
She came over to my desk and asked me to write ‘thank you’ for her, on the bit of
paper which was going to be the ‘card’. My quickly written ‘thank you’ is
reproduced in Figure 9.1 (overleaf). After about a minute or so she returned,
saying, ‘Look, I’ve done it’, showing me the mark/sign which is here at the
bottom of the paper.
The question that this raised for me, and I am not fully certain that I have yet
answered it for myself, is this: what was it that she had done? And what
principles were at issue for her, in her reading?
Clearly she had ‘read’ my quickly written sign, the ‘thank you’; equally
clearly she had not copied it. Notions of ‘copying’ or of ‘imitating’ are ready to
hand to describe what children do, but they ensure that we ourselves misread
what is at issue. On the one hand, whatever else the child’s sign might have
been, it was not a copy, not even an imperfect one. On the other hand, the notion
of ‘imitation’ already implies a decision on our part to treat the ‘inner’ sign that
results from her reading as not fully a sign, not based on principles of
interpretation and, equally, the outwardly visible sign that she made from that
‘inner sign’ – which she made on the sheet of paper – as simply being a doodle.