Page 163 - Literacy in the New Media Age

152 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

a picture and write a story of the visit. Figure 9.6 shows a picture drawn by one
boy and his story below (the two were produced by him on separate pieces of
paper). The logic of the story is clear: sequence of actions/events in time is the
organising order. The logic of the image is equally clear: this is about the use of
space to display the elements and their relation to each other – ‘me and the
mummy’ – which are most significant to this young person in his recollection of
the day.
In my reading of the story and of the image I am positioned very differently:
the one tells me about the world of events in sequence, the other shows me the
world of relations between objects. The one tells me about the significance of
events and of their sequential order; the other shows me the salience of the
elements regarded by the boy as the most significant in his recollection, and their
relation to each other. I might ask further about the manner in which I as a reader
am positioned: the story has a reading path, both literally, along the lines of
writing, from top to bottom, from left to right, as well as in its simple sequential
unfolding. It is clear and given; if I wish to go against it, I have to work hard to
do so. The syntax which gives order to the elements of the text, the sentences, is
also clear, and strictly given: I cannot read elements ‘out of order’, in the
sentences or parts of sentences (for the concept of ‘reading path’ see Kress and
Van Leeuwen, 1996).
The image by contrast does not have such a clearly set reading path: I might
start with the figure of the boy, and move to the mummy which he is showing
me. Or I might start with the central figure of the mummy, taking spatial
centrality to indicate centrality of meaning, and move from there to the figure of
the boy who stands to the side as ‘my guide’. With more complex images, the
question of the reading path becomes, if anything, more free. This is not to
say that images do not display (and adhere to) ‘regularities’, to a ‘grammar’.
Images are not beyond convention, and viewers of images do not simply act
‘individually’. It is to say that at this moment in history the force of convention
does not press as heavily on makers of image or on viewers, perhaps in part
because images have remained outside the very close control of social and
cultural power which has been applied to writing in particular. Individual readers
do act in accordance with socially established practices of viewing. More
complex narratives, by contrast, need not give me greater freedom or openness in
the reading path. It may also be the case that – as in languages with relatively
free word-order – it is not that they do not have grammar, but that the grammar
as resource offers other potentials than a language with a strict word-order. Work
in the psychology of image recognition may offer useful insight at this point.
I might go further and ask about the ‘lexis’, that is the ‘words’ of speech or
writing, and the ‘shown or depicted elements’ in images. In another example
from this class, a boy writes as a part of his story (again largely about events in
sequence): ‘I liked the mummies and all that stuff’. The word ‘mummies’ is
known to me; but that knowledge does not allow me to attempt to reproduce in a
drawing what that mummy actually looked like. The mummies that he drew (two,