Page 57 - Literacy in the New Media Age

46 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

these leads, in the culturally and socially valued modes such as speech and
writing and image, to preferred textual/generic forms: narrative in speech and in
writing, and display in visual modes.
Some modes – gesture, but writing also – are mixed, in that they participate in
both logics: gesture is in the logic of space and of time; writing to some extent
also. It leans heavily still – in alphabetically recorded languages – on the
temporality of speech but has begun to make use of spatial resources, both
actually and virtually: actually in spacings (spaces between letters, words), line
forms, paragraphs, but also with other spatial features such as indents, bullet
points, blocks of writing; and virtually, in the hierarchical structures of the
syntax of writing. But mixed logics are, above all, a feature of multimodal texts,
that is, texts made up of elements of modes which are based on different logics.
Mixed logics pose new questions: of reading, but also of design in writing.
The distinct representational and communicational affordances of modes lead
to their functional specialisation, either over time, by repeated uses in a culture,
or by the interested use of the individual sign-maker/designer. That is, if writing
is better for representing events in sequence, and image is better for representing
the relation of elements in space, then it is likely that each will be chosen
according to what it is best for. There is no inevitability about that, however: for
a long period in the ‘West’, writing was used for tasks for which image is now
beginning to be more commonly used. A culture can work with or against
affordances, for reasons that lie with concerns other than representation. In
multimodal texts, information may be carried largely in one mode, more than in
others. There will therefore be a difference in the functional load which each
mode carries. In school textbooks of thirty, forty years ago, most of the
functional load was carried by writing; now that relation has become inverted,
and much or most of the load is carried by images of various kinds. This varies
from school-subject to school-subject, as it varies from social domain to social
domain.
The materiality of modes has, as one other consequence, the effect of mode in
relation to the physiology of bodily reception and production of meaning. Sound
has its physiological channels of reception, as does sight, and so of course do all
modes, through touch and feel, smell, taste. Each of these sensory channels is
capable in principle of being developed culturally for full communication and
representation – as touch is in Braille, for instance, for the sight-impaired. But
beyond that, the bodilyness of mode has quite other implications which have to
be considered in a new theory of meaning. The affective affordances of sound
are entirely different to those of sight or those of touch; sound is more
immediately tangibly felt in the body than is sight, but certainly differently felt. A
theory of meaning that is inattentive to these will not be able to provide fully
satisfactory accounts of the new communicational forms.
Human semiosis is constantly and ceaselessly engaged in representing the
world, with resources which are never fully adequate to this task. For that
reason, the process of transformation is central: that which is not adequate is