Page 65 - Literacy in the New Media Age
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54 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE
Figure 4.3 ‘Diary’: a day in the life of a red blood cell
for instance, carries meanings of movement, of constraint, and an evaluation of
negativeness, and ‘left’ and ‘came’ carry indications of direction, ‘from’ and
‘to’. Here there is just one lexical accident, not many as in the written text.
Importantly, in the visual mode, repetition carries no stigma. In fact, were the
arrow-shafts to be of various thicknesses, or of noticeably varied length, broken
or dotted, these would be read as deliberate means of indicating different
meanings.
One basic accident of the visual representation is the fact that whether wanted
or not, meaning has to be expressed as spatial relations. A particular spatial
