Page 61 - Literacy in the New Media Age

50 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

with full awareness of the affordances of many modes and of the media and their
sites of appearance. Anything and everything is now subject to design: that
which is to be communicated (in an educational context, the ‘curriculum’; in
other contexts, the ‘message’); the modal realisation of the curriculum or of the
message – as word, as image, as word and image, as colour, as moving
image and sound; the site of appearance – the book or the screen, and if the
screen, the website page or the CD-ROM?
This is an aim which encompasses and exceeds competence, and it
encompasses and exceeds critique. Awareness of the affordances of modes and
the facilities of media provides competence, but design crucially introduces the
interest and the desire of the maker of the message/text. On the part of the
reader, awareness of the affordances of mode and facilities of media allows her or
him to know what prior uses there have been of the affordances of the resource in
the message he or she is engaging with. That allows them to form their
hypotheses about the purposes which may have given rise to this use of the
resources. Critique is anchored to the ground of someone’s past agendas; design
projects the purposes, interests and desires of the maker into the future. Design is
prospective not retrospective, constructive not deconstructive, utopian and not
nostalgic.
Among the many things that are subject to design is the reading path of the
text. In the traditional written text this was ‘taken care of’ by convention, though
it could of course, and still can, be interrupted or disturbed if that was desired,
either by the maker of the text or by its reader. By contrast, in Western images of
most kinds the reading path is not automatically given or readily recoverable. It
may be constructed by the maker of the image through the many devices that are
available to her or him, but the viewer might still not notice it, may in any case
not wish to follow it, in part because convention has not regulated the viewing of
image as strongly as it has the reading of written text. The reading path provides
more than just a kind of handy rope or guide-rail along a difficult path; it marks
the line along which a text is to be read ‘properly’. I give examples which show
that to follow different reading paths is to construct profoundly differing
readings, epistemologically speaking. The new opposition which I describe in the
chapter on reading is that between reading the world as told – reading as
interpretation – and reading the world as shown – reading as imposing salience
and order, reading as design. The former tends to go with the established reading
path of the traditional written text, the latter with the to-be-constructed reading
path of the image, or the to-be-constructed reading path of the multimodally
constructed text.
It is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that the affordances of different modes
(together with matters such as generic form) have profound effects on that which
is to be realised in the mode. This is the insight gained from the ‘linguistic turn’
of the 1970s, which showed that language was not a neutral vehicle for
representation. All modes have that effect. Knowledge changes its shape when it
is realised in the different modal material. Multimodality, and multimodal design,