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
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