Page 165 - Literacy in the New Media Age

154 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

commonsense views about language and image which see language and word as
precise and explicit, and image as imprecise and inexplicit. While the lexis of a
language, in speech or writing, consists of (relatively speaking) a fixed number
of available elements, each element is relatively open in meaning. In visual lexis,
however, there is no fixed number of available elements, but each element,
which is each time newly produced, is fixed, in terms of being specific about
what it represents.
In my last example, Figure 9.7, I want to show how image and writing go
together in multimodal texts, and how they might be read together as a text
which is internally coherent. The example comes from a science textbook for 13-
to 14-year-olds; it was first published in 1988.
Several points need to be made. The comments about the logics of writing and
of image apply here pretty much as they did in the example drawn from the
writing and drawings of the 6-year-olds in my discussion of the British Museum
examples. I said that there is a deep difference in the engagement and
representation of the world through image and through writing. Two quite
distinct versions of the day are offered to the ‘reader’ in image and in writing,
along the lines that I have suggested: the world represented as a sequence of
action or event versus the world represented as objects and their relations.
This is no less the case here. Here the issue is not what happened on a
particular day, an account of events, but an account of an issue, a topic in the
science curriculum. Writing and image broadly share the page, with somewhat
more space given over to image than to writing. The significant point, however,
is that there is a specialisation of functions between writing and image. Writing
is used to provide the pedagogic framing for this part of the curriculum – what
we did last time, what we will do now, how well it worked or did not work, what
it would be best to do, and so on. Image is used to represent that which is the
issue, the core of the curricular issue here: what a circuit is, what the elements of
a circuit are, how we think about circuits theoretically, and what circuits are like
in practice. That content does not appear in any part of the written text. Writing
is used for that which writing does best – to provide, in fact, an account of
events, and image is used for that which image does best, to depict the world that
is at issue, in terms of the significant elements and their (spatially represented)
relations to each other. Writing is, by and large, about the action and events
involving the significant participants – both the ‘you’ and ‘we’ of the students,
and the objects and elements of the curricular world, of the circuits.
This difference in the use of modes here is motivated in two ways. One is the
motivation of ‘best fit’: that which is best represented as spatial display is shown
as image, and that which is best represented as event and action in sequence is
told in writing. In other words, the use of the mode rests on the inherent
affordances of each mode. Of course, the inherent affordance of the mode has
large aspects of past social and cultural work to it; it is possible because of
cultural work with the affordance of the material aspects of the mode. This
cultural aspect I call functional specialisation. That this is culturally and