Page 50 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 39

horoscope ‘little’ is likely to have a different meaning, depending on just how
good or bad their day has been up to this moment.
Of course we do have a sense of what ‘little’ can mean, because of what it has
meant in all the instances in which we have encountered it before. The
hypotheses which we form in reading as to what a word, a phrase, a clause,
might mean proceed on the basis of the outward ‘look’ of that element as we
have met it many times before – whether it is the ‘lexical form’, the word ‘look’
or the abstract grammatical or syntactic or textual form. Whatever that form or
element might be – a genre, a sentence type, a grammatical category, a word – it
is the best available indicator to the meaning of the element.
These hypotheses are based on the experience of the reader, available to her or
him usually as implicit knowledge about the shape and the previous meanings of
the elements encountered. The taking of information or meaning from the text is
therefore always an approximation. When as a reader I see a word, a phrase, a
genre, I say to myself, ‘I have encountered this before and it has meant these
things; it is likely to mean something broadly in that same range.’ From the
perspective of the text-maker, the reader’s meanings are always approximations.
As I said, in reading, the reader ‘fills’ the form with her or his meaning, hence
the form as interpreted by the reader is always a transformation of the maker’s
meaning. The result of that transformation is then available to the reader as
(new) information or knowledge about the world, and is assimilated in its
transformed shape into the reader’s existent knowledge. Its assimilation or
integration into the reader’s existent knowledge produces a rearrangement of all
the elements there – however infinitesimally slight that rearrangement might be –
amounting to a transformation of all the meanings of all the elements and of their
interrelations. Getting meaning from reading is the effect of a process something
like this, and meaning ‘is taken’ at the moment when the ‘taken meaning’ is
integrated into the existing totality of all meaning in the brain. At that point I, the
reader, know ‘the meaning’ of what I have read, for myself. Indeed, meaning
cannot ever be other or more than meaning for myself.
In writing, meaning is made at the moment when ‘that which is to be meant’ is
fused with ‘that which can mean it’, that is, when a meaning is matched with a
form/signifier by the writer, in the most apt fashion possible. That meaning is
complex, because it is both that which the ‘meaner’ wishes to mean, as her or his
interest in meaning, and the manner in which she or he knows that they have to
produce their meaning as an appropriate shaping of that meaning for the social
environment in which the meaner’s meaning is to be communicated. In other
words, the meaning to be expressed has to be shaped to its social environment to
make it suit the maker’s sense of the needs of the environment of communication.
For instance, I know that I need to speak to the powerful in a certain way, or
write to them in a certain way, distinctly different to the way in which I speak or
write to someone who is not as powerful as I am.
In both writing and reading, meaning is the result of (semiotic) work. Work
always changes those who do the work, and it changes that which is worked on.