Page 68 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 57

Figure 4.5 Concept map 2: blood circulation

suggesting causality: ‘it is terribly cramped in here, as [because] the capillaries
are tiny and [because] there are millions of us. In the visual mode there are no
implications of cause. In the case of the concept map, movement suggested by
the arrows means ‘point of origin’ and ‘point of destination’, or it may mean origin
and succession. Causality is not or only very weakly implied, if at all.
Spatial relations are not oriented to causality; no doubt causality can be
conveyed by visual means, but more semiotic work needs to be done to achieve
it. Temporal (sequential) relations, on the other hand, seem to be strongly
oriented in that way. The (lexical) naming seems, from that point of view, to be a
cultural strengthening of an affordance already inherently present for human
interpreters in this mode.

Mode and conceptual-cognitive complexity
The move to multimodal representation, though I suspect as part of a much more
widely ramified set of social processes, has given rise to a change in the mode of
writing which can be variously described either as a move to simpler syntax, or as
a move towards a more speech-like clausal syntax. Let me contrast two bits of
writing from science textbooks for the same age-group – 12- to 13-year-olds – by
focusing on the characteristics of sentences. ‘One of the problems to which man
has been turning his wits from earliest times is how to increase the comparatively
small force which he can exert with his muscles into forces large enough to give