Page 181 - Literacy in the New Media Age
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170 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE
normal and unremarkable in every instance of sign-making. Innovativeness,
in the sense of producing ‘the new’, is, equally, an automatic consequence of
sign-making: all signs are new, all combinations of resources in the making of a
specific message are likely to be new.
Imagination
This leaves a question about ‘imagination’, the process of ‘supplementing’ a
message with meaning, of ‘adding meaning’ to a message. Throughout the book
I have insisted both that signs are always newly made, and that meaning is
realised differently in different modes. In the new making of signs the sign-maker
‘supplies meaning’ so to speak, whether in the outward production of the sign –
in articulation – or in the inward production of the sign – in interpretation. When
I start ‘dreaming’, ‘taking off’, so to speak, from one interpretation, one inwardly
made sign, to the next and to the next and to the next in my ‘imagination’, then
this process is no different to the usual processes of semiosis which take place all
the time.
The question is therefore not ‘is there imagination?’ because there always is;
rather the question is ‘does imagination have different form or shape or
characteristics with different modes?’ In Chapter 9 I began to answer that
question around the emerging differences in reading that are characteristic of the
new period. I suggested that in speech or writing the work of ‘imagination’ – at
the simplest level – consists in filling the relatively ‘empty’ elements along the
strictly prescribed reading paths with the reader’s meaning. Of course, these
elements are then configured, at other levels, into more complex elements,
whether larger narrative structures or other generic/textual entities, themselves
interacting with each other in complex designs both of the writer’s and reader’s
making. I suggested that in image(-like) messages, by contrast, the reading paths
tended to be much more open, or not readily apparent, or not even discernible or
present, while the entities themselves were plain full of meaning. Here the
supplementing of meaning consists much more in the imposition of an order onto
a set of elements, and the ordering of a world seemingly or actually left
unordered. ‘Imagination’ now becomes a different activity, one which focuses on
the possibilities of the ordering of full elements rather than on the supplying of
meaning to ordered elements.
In multimodal ensembles, of writing and image, or of writing, speech, image,
music and so on, the possibilities of supplementing messages with meaning
multiply, and incorporate the demands and the potentials of imagination of all
the modes involved. To this we must add the never absent process of
synaesthesia, the transduction inwardly, in interpretation, between modes – from
spoken to visual, from sound to colour, from image to smell, and so on.
The new theory of meaning and semiosis – and deriving from these, of
learning – which I believe is called for will need to concern itself with such issues.
In the move from the cultural and social dominance of the modes of speech and