Page 16 - Literacy in the New Media Age

THE FUTURES OF LITERACY 5

Affordances of mode and facilities of media
The shift in mode would, even by itself, produce the changes that I have
mentioned. The change in media, largely from book and page to screen, the
change from the traditional print-based media to the new information and
communication technologies, will intensify these effects. However, the new
media have three further effects. They make it easy to use a multiplicity of
modes, and in particular the mode of image – still or moving – as well as other
modes, such as music and sound effect for instance. They change, through their
affordances, the potentials for representational and communicational action by
their users; this is the notion of ‘interactivity’ which figures so prominently in
discussions of the new media. Interactivity has at least two aspects: one is
broadly interpersonal, for instance, in that the user can ‘write back’ to the
producer of a text with no difficulty – a potential achievable only with very great
effort or not at all with the older media, and it permits the user to enter into an
entirely new relation with all other texts – the notion of hypertextuality. The one
has an effect on social power directly, the other has an effect on semiotic power,
and through that on social power less immediately.
The technology of the new information and communication media rests among
other factors on the use of a single code for the representation of all information,
irrespective of its initial modal realisation. Music is analysed into this digital
code just as much as image is, or graphic word, or other modes. That offers the
potential to realise meaning in any mode. This is usually talked about as the
multimedia aspect of this technology, because with the older media there existed
a near automatic association and identification of mode (say, writing) with
medium (say, book).
With print-based technology – technologically oriented and aligned with word
– the production of written text was made easy, whereas the production of image
was difficult; the difficulty expresses itself still in monetary cost. Hence image was
(relatively) rare, and printed word was ubiquitous in the book and on the page.
With the new media there is little or no cost to the user in choosing a path of
realisation towards image rather than towards word. Given that the
communicational world around us is moving to a preference for image in many
domains, the new technology facilitates, supports and intensifies that preference.
What is true of word and image is also increasingly true of other modes. The
ease in the use of different modes, a significant aspect of the affordances of the
new technologies of information and communication, makes the use of a
multiplicity of modes usual and unremarkable. That mode which is judged best
by the designer of the message for specific aspects of the message and for a
particular audience can be chosen with no difference in ‘cost’. Multimodality is
made easy, usual, ‘natural’ by these technologies. And such naturalised uses of
modes will lead to greater specialisation of modes: affordances of modes will
become aligned with representational and communicative need.