Page 167 - Literacy in the New Media Age

156 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

was, very different. Its syntax was hugely more complex, in order to deal with
the complexities of the matter that had to be represented.
The second motivation is both curricular and pedagogic: curricular because it
may be felt that an entity which has spatial existence ‘in reality’ is best
represented in the spatial mode of image; and pedagogic, because it may be felt
that this generation, and this group of students, is best addressed through image,
for a variety of reasons. Image figures hugely in the lives of young people; image
may be seen as more immediately accessible; image may therefore be seen to be
the better communicational route to the mass-audience of science now – as
against the elite audience of science thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Past uses of
writing and image are instructive in this respect: textbooks of that other era used
writing as the dominant mode, not conscious that there was a choice of mode –
which in a sense there was not then: image was not culturally and above all socially
‘available’ for full representation – but certainly conscious that the audience was
an elite audience, and gender-specific.
This represents a sharp, a near total, difference to textbooks from even thirty
years ago in which the curricular content was communicated in writing and
images served as ‘illustration’: that is, they repeated something that had been
‘said’ in the written text in some form. It is instructive to realise that textbooks
then could be read, that is, they could be realised in the sounds of speech, no
matter how awkwardly unspeech-like the writing actually was.

Choosing how to read: reading paths
The page in Figure 9.7 cannot be read aloud; it is not meant to be read that way.
The conception of text underlying this page, and how it is to be used and handled
is simply different to older pages and texts. The written text here is not the full
representation; it has a function which is complementary to the
visually represented text. That complementarity is not straightforward. At times
the written parts of the text are labels of image, or instructions in relation to
image; at times they are relatively independently coherent textual elements –
even though they have a specific function in relation to the text overall. If we
insisted that reading aloud what is written here were to be seen as a full reading,
we would get sound strings which do not form a coherently organised text, and
the reading would miss out those aspects of meaning, the curricular content,
which, after all, is the central aspect of this text-page, and which are realised
visually.
There is then a question about how to read this page as an integrated, coherent
text. At this point the question of the reading path arises, because in some ways
there has to be a reading ‘across’ the two modes, a reading that brings together
the meaning realised via the two modes. In older forms of page this may seem not
to be an issue: we start at the top-left corner, read across to the right, return to the
left one line down, and continue. There is seemingly no choice. And indeed, if
we are interested in ‘getting the meaning’ of the text as it was intended –