Page 174 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 163

of for them by their parents, teachers and others, who can offer only their
annoyance and outrage.
Maybe in passing we might note two things, however. One is that these new
arrangements have spread from the screen well beyond the pages of Playstation
magazines – as of other magazines – and of school science (as of other) textbook
pages. Newspapers, pamphlets, reports of various kinds are all being
reconfigured by this move. The reader of the tabloid newspaper who may have
none or only the most minimal amount of writing on the front page of the paper
that they buy may not give much time to reflect on the trend that they are part of,
and may even be entirely willing to go along with the populist rant of a
columnist in that paper against the trend. And in that, he or she may only be
different in degree from the reader of the ‘quality’ paper which is affected by the
same move, even if to a lesser extent.
The other is to note the manner of reading of writing by those who are entirely
inward with the reading of the new pages and of the screens. As I said, many of
these games do have writing, whether in tabular form as instructions,
specifications of qualities of weapons, and so on, or as bits of verbal interaction
as part of the visually and verbally realised narrative. When I have watched
expert players at play I have been amazed at the fact that I am unable to take in
the written text and its information in the time during which it appears on the
screen. I am aware that I am not a particularly fast reader, but I am not
particularly slow either. I have checked on numerous occasions whether the
players were able to read and had read the written bits of texts, to find both
astonishment on their part at my question, and confirmation that they had indeed
read what had appeared. They were always willing to tell me their principles:
‘you read the letters as they come up’ (sometimes with a condescending ‘Dad!’).
And it is true that I had waited, and still have to do so, until what I consider a
sufficient amount of text to be there on the screen. My orientation it seems really
is different: I am oriented to notions of ‘completed text’; they are oriented to
notions of ‘information as it is supplied’. I have no doubt that both are useful;
and equally I have no doubt as to which will be most essential in their future
lives.

Reading paths and access to knowledge

Writing and image have coexisted for a long time, and in different ways. In the
period of the dominance of the page (and the book) and writing, the page was
organised according to the logic of writing. Image, where it occurred on the page,
was subordinated to that logic. In the new period of the dominance of the screen,
and of image, the screen (as the currently most prominent form of image-space)
is organised according to the logic of the image; writing, where it occurs on the
screen, is subordinated to the logic of the screen and the image. That has
fundamentally significant consequences for reading. For instance, in the case of
the page from the science textbook above (Figure 9.7), if we treat the page as an