Page 66 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 55

ordering with its meanings has to be chosen; students chose different
arrangements for their concept maps; as in Figures 4.4 and 4.5, for instance.
In the map in Figure 4.5, directionality is indicated in the left-to-right
arrangement of the ‘concepts’, suggesting movement from left to right, by
analogy with the reading direction of Western alphabetic writing. There are
negative consequences of expressing meaning through spatial relations. Not only
is it the case that one specific organisation has to be chosen – centrality and
marginality; or central and concentric; or left as origin and movement to the right
as destination – but also every instance of a particular relation means the same.
The meaning necessarily dictated by choosing one element as central – as blood
is in Figure 4.4 – means that other elements cannot be. But that might not be
what the maker of the concept map intended. He might not have wished to make
a choice; something of that is indicated in Figure 4.5, where there are two
starting points, the heart and the lungs.
The problem of the single meaning of the relation has obviously struck the
makers of these maps, who feel the need to supplement the arrows and lines
with written labels of various kinds, indicating that in fact the different lines and
arrows mean different things. Of course this may be an effect of the maker’s
relative incompetence in constructing such maps, or the relative unsuitability of
the genre for this task – something that is not uncommon in demands made by
teachers – but it does show a limitation of this mode in this genre.

Mode and epistemological commitment
Each mode demands what I shall call epistemological commitments. If I say ‘a
plant cell has a nucleus’, I have been forced by the mode to provide a name for
the relation between the cell and the nucleus. I have named it as a relation of
possession, ‘have’. If I draw the cell, and have been asked to indicate the nucleus,
my drawing requires me to place the element that indicates the nucleus
somewhere; I cannot avoid that epistemological commitment. Whether I actually
think that it is just there, or whether I wanted to indicate a special place, I cannot
avoid placing it somewhere. A viewer of my drawing is entitled to assume that
‘there’ is where it is supposed to be. My drawing, however, does not require me
to say anything about possession, just as the writing did not require me to say
where in the cell the nucleus is located.

Mode and causality
Causality may be one of the most significant of such accidents. If, in the diary, we
read ‘I … squeezed my way through’, we know that the agent that did the squeezing
is the agent who caused this action. Causation is just about built into clauses in
languages such as English, with their noun-subject–verb–object structures, where
noun-subject carries more or less implicitly the meaning of agentive cause.
Sequence of events as represented in sequences of clauses is often open to a