Page 178 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 167

frames. Or, in a different way, the use of fonts, of size points in the same
direction. Increasingly, written elements are used as visual elements in
compositions of a visual kind in the first instance. The affordances of fonts as
images are being used more and more. The latent visuality of the graphic medium
of writing will become more foregrounded. The relation of writing to sound will
become correspondingly weaker, although the potential of voice to machine
interaction constitutes a force moving in the direction of sound.
The use of image as a fully representational mode is having its effects on the very
syntax of language. As part of the ‘communicational load’ of a message goes to
the image, the need for syntactic/conceptual complexity of the written part of the
message/text diminishes. Reading of written text is becoming simpler, for
instance in the decreasing clausal complexity of sentences, and it is becoming
specialised. At the same time, reading of the multimodal message/text is
becoming more complex. In the new landscapes of communication, with the
dominance of the new media, and with the ‘old’ media (the book for instance)
being reshaped by the forms of the new media, the demands on readers, and the
demands of reading, will if anything be greater, and they will certainly be
different. That constitutes the new agenda for thinking about reading.