Page 175 - Literacy in the New Media Age

164 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

‘old’ page, then it is read according to the logic of writing: from top-left-hand
corner to the right, and all the way down. In that reading path, the reader
encounters the highly abstract image of the circuit first, and moves from there to
the realist representation of the circuit. The move, in other words, is from the
highly generalised (the theoretical abstraction) to the empirical/specific. If,
however, we treat this page as a new image-site, the reading becomes a different
one. Now the logic of the image-space obtains, and we look for the meanings of
the spatially organised display. Now the semiotics of a framed space, in which
left and right, bottom and top, centre and margin, have been used and developed
in Western cultures in particular ways, lends significance to the elements which
appear in those spaces. In this ordering, this logic, the realist image at the bottom
occupies a space which in the Western visual semiotic has the meaning of (the
empirically) ‘real’, the ‘grounded’, and the highly abstract image above it has the
meaning of ‘ideal’. This reading, which reads from bottom – ‘the real’ – to top –
‘the ideal’ – corresponds to a different epistemological position than the earlier
one: the one is broadly inductive, the other broadly deductive. One of the
fundamentally distinctive principles of modes of scientific – and other
theoretical – approaches is coded in this feature.

Shifts in power: (re)producers of multimodal texts

This raises again the question of the reading path, though in a different way. In a
sense an initial assessment made by the reader at the start of their reading as to
how the text is to be read – whether as a page of the older kind or as screen (or
page) of the newer kind – is not due to an idiosyncratic, individual response. It
has much or everything to do with the reader’s socialisation into a particular media
environment, and the valuations of media (book or PC, for instance) and modes
(writing or image, for instance) in that media landscape (see Boeck and Kress
(2002) for a discussion of that issue). Dependent on that assessment, different
logics then apply, and different strategies of reading. For me, socialised in the
high era of the page, of the book, and of writing, my naturalised strategy leads
me to see the page as the domain of writing, and to treat the screen similarly. In
other words, such dispositions have much to do with social characteristics,
among which age (as social generational difference) for instance, gender
possibly (note the public alarm in many Western countries about the differential
patterns of achievement of boys and girls in ‘literacy’), and no doubt others play
their part. Those who have been socialised into the contemporary media world may
be disposed to see the screen as their point of reference for strategies of reading;
those who were socialised into the former media world may see the page as their
point of reference. For members of the two (or more) groups, what appears to be
the same text calls forth different strategies of reading, and gives rise to different
readings of what are in reality different texts.
This is a power that, at the moment, lies more with the reader than with the text
or its maker. It is a new power in the sense that in the former era there was no