Page 177 - Literacy in the New Media Age

166 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

viewer for the establishing of relations between elements in the representation,
which in the syntax of speech or writing are fully pre-given.
It will be essential to look with great care at the ‘semiotic affordances’ of
image, of writing and of speech, and of multimodal texts, to see how the relative
powers of makers and receivers of texts are reconfigured in this new
dispensation. The power of the reader to remake the text in its reading –
something recognised since the work of Roland Barthes in the late 1960s
(Barthes, 1977) and now part of a common sense around reading – depended
precisely on the affordances of writing. The syntax of writing is stable, and there
is a considerable fixedness of the reading path in written texts. The lexical
elements in writing are pre-given, so that it is possible to write dictionaries of the
language (even if lexis is also constantly expanding). However, this stability in
syntax, and of (aspects of) textual organisation, is complemented by a relative
semantic openness of the lexical elements themselves, which need the reader to
fill them with meaning.
The viewer is, as I have suggested, positioned very differently. The image is
semantically precise and closed: or at least many types of image are – it will be
important to study this carefully. But the syntax of images, and the reading paths
to be followed by the viewer, are much more open to the ordering, designing
work of the viewer. I do not wish to make an assessment here, other than to say
that there will be shifts in kinds of work, forms of imagination, possibilities for
the transformative work of reading as sign-making, and therefore shifts in the
relative powers of readers/viewers and makers of texts. In a multimodal text the
picture is correspondingly complex.
The work of reading, and the demands made of readers, will, in this new
landscape, be different and greater. The anxieties of cultural pessimists about the
‘decline in cultures of reading’ (sometimes expressed more recently in that
questionable phrase ‘dumbing down’) are premature. The opposite will very
much be the case.

The future of reading in the multimodal landscape of the
‘West’

The screen is now the dominant site of texts; it is the site which shapes the
imagination of the current generation around communication. The screen is the
site of the visual, of the image. This does not mean that writing cannot appear on
the screen, but when it does, it will be appearing there subordinated to the logic
of the visual. This will have many consequences: reading will increasingly
proceed in terms of the application of the logic of the image to writing. But
a further development, which is already apparent and which will intensify, is that
the always present visuality of writing will become intensified. At the moment this
appears in a number of seemingly disparate ways, for instance the attempt to
make the meaning units of writing correspond more closely to an iconic/mimetic
visual shape, through indenting, bullet points, boxings of various kinds, use of