Page 48 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 37

communication is now constituted in ways that make it imperative to highlight
the concept of design, rather than of concepts such as acquisition, or
competence, or critique. This is particularly essential given new requirements of
education – even if these are not at the moment (officially) recognised. It is no
longer responsible to let children experience school without basing schooling on
an understanding of the shift from competent performance to design as the
foundational fact of contemporary social and economic life. The world of the
new economies that I have earlier alluded to makes that an essential requirement.
In multimodal communication, the concept of design is the sine qua non of
informed, reflective and productive practice. The opposition between the linked
terms of knowledge and information hovers around here, and within these there
is something about mode, ontology and epistemology, and about modality in the
more traditional sense of ‘proximity to truth’. Many other terms are significant,
but among these none more so than that of reading path: it plays hugely into
older and newer conceptions of the processes and the real tasks of reading.
Because the present state and the likely future of literacy causes such anxiety –
at times at least partially justified – I want to say something briefly about the
affordances of writing and image, and perhaps of speech as well. This may be
useful in countering some of what seem to me unjustified outbursts of cultural
pessimism around the move from writing to image.

A ‘toolkit’

The concept of meaning has been difficult enough to grapple with in the modes
of speech and writing, and the subdisciplines of linguistics such as semantics and
pragmatics set up specifically to deal with a basic flaw in most theories of
language have not – unsurprisingly – been able to provide satisfactory accounts.
In a multimodal framework the general questions remain, though the approach,
given the semiotic framework, differs. There is no question of separating form
from meaning; the sign is always meaning-as-form and form-as-meaning. The
means of dealing with meaning are different; we need to understand how
meanings are made as signs in distinct ways in specific modes, as the result of
the interest of the maker of the sign, and we have to find ways of understanding
and describing the integration of such meanings across modes, into coherent
wholes, into texts.
Meaning is the result of (semiotic) work, whether as articulation in the
outwardly made sign, as in writing, or as interpretation in the inwardly made
sign, as in reading. The semiotic work done in the reading of text in alphabetic
writing is twofold. It is the work of filling the elements of writing with content.
In fact the task resembles that of forming hypotheses about the ‘content’ of these
elements, and it is the work of making sense of these elements in all the possible
combinations which they can contract with each other in the text. These elements
may be sentences (though they may also be units above the sentence, whether