Page 168 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 157

allowing for the transformative action of the reader in any reading – we need to
adhere to that reading path. But just because an action has become totally
habituated does not mean that the choice is not there. There are forms of
pathology in which this habituation has not happened, and those in which it has
unravelled. However, even in quite usual forms of reading, such as ‘skimming’,
we tend to depart quite significantly from such paths. Children learning to read
find this seemingly obvious issue not at all straightforward, and it is instructive
to look closely at their careful analysis of this question – disentangling
directionality from linearity (see Figure 9.8, overleaf), and directionality of
individual elements such as letters and letter-sequences in words from the
directionality of lines.
In these examples here, the child reader/writer has puzzled about this issue in
the way I described above; successively, over time, and with more knowledge of
this system, she comes closer and closer to the regularities which her culture has
adopted.
As we know this matter of the reading path is a cultural decision. Different
cultures have made different decisions about reading paths in their writing
systems, whether from right to left or from left to right, in lines or in columns,
circular or linear. Multimodal texts open this question again, in two ways: once
in terms of directionality, and then also in terms – more problematically perhaps
– of what the elements are which are to form the ‘points’ along which we trace
the reading path.
If we take the ‘circuits’ text (Figure 9.7) as our example, we can show that
there is a choice to be made. It can be read as a new text, not only in being
multimodal, but new also in standing uneasily between being a text to be read in
the mode of traditional written text, though with images included, or a text to be
viewed as a kind of image, with writing included. If we take it as an older form
of text, a text that conforms to the rules, conventions and logic of the older page
(and of writing), then the older, linear form of reading path applies to it. We
would start at the top of the left column, read across, then down, across, and so
on. We would, however, encounter the problem of what the elements of this text
to be read are when we came to the first image, and its ‘caption’, on the left.
At this point we have to make a decision about the ‘elements’ that are to be
read together. In the written text, we read – I will make this assumption here
without justifying it – sentence by sentence, as the relevant meaning-units of the
text. That is, we read at one level ‘down’ from the overall unit. Do we, when we
come to it, move to the image and read it immediately at the same level, at the
level equivalent to ‘sentence’? Of course, to do so would require that we know as
much about the constitution of the image as we do about the constitution of the
written part of the text. But that is not the only issue.
My assumption is that in reading such texts we proceed differently. When we
encounter pages or texts of this kind, obviously constituted of distinct modes, we
do a kind of modal ‘scanning’ of the page. In real time this would be next to
instantaneous, but it would tell us that the text is composed of elements of