Page 75 - Literacy in the New Media Age

64 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

The use of the resources depends of course on social factors, as I have
mentioned. For instance, if social power is now no longer as strongly asserted as
it was twenty years ago, then levels of formality in writing will change. That has
its effects on the use of the resources and their involvement in syntactic
processes and transformations. Writing, like meaning-making in any mode,
always happens in a particular social domain. The meanings of that domain, as
they are projected in texts by writers, shape the resources in its use. Hence
specific morphological and syntactic arrangements can become characteristic of
the use of the resource of writing in a particular domain. The social configuration
of a group and its concerns, the social meanings and values of that group, have
their effects on the habitual uses of the resource and, in this way, in the longer-
term shaping of the resource in that domain.

Writing in the age of the screen: aspects of visual grammar

Had I been writing this chapter ten years ago, I would have felt that, by and large,
that was more or less what there was to think and say about the matter: the
question of what the resources of writing are, and of how people use them. Of
course, even within that framework there are many things to explore. But writing
the chapter now I am aware that things are very different. The screen more than
the page is now the dominant site of representation and communication in
general, so that even in writing, things cannot be left there. As I have said, what
is fundamental is that the screen is the site of the image, and the logic of the
image dominates the semiotic organisation of the screen.
This happens in at least two ways. First, the screen, and whatever appears on
it, is treated as a visual entity. Even though the graphic marks, the graphic stuff,
may be those of letters, that stuff is organised – potentially or actually, more or
less – as visual stuff. It is ‘laid out’ according to principles which are visual
principles: bullet-points are an instance; so are spacings, indenting, treatment of
margins, of white space as visual framing. The written text now has to look
good. Of course, aesthetic principles governed the look of the page: but that was
then a matter for those professionals whose jobs were associated with writing:
from ‘typists’ to typesetters and printers. Now everyone can and really needs to
‘play about’ with such matters. Added to this are other graphic or visual effects,
such as bolding, differentiations in size and type of fonts, and so on. These make
writing as a whole and letter in particular into visual entities, adding meanings of
the visual modes to those of writing. On the screen, the textual entity is treated as
a visual entity in ways in which the page never was.
Second, a significant organisational feature is that writing, whether on the
screen or on the page, is accompanied more and more by image, whether as
‘picture’, diagram or map. In these writing/image ensembles placement, the
spatial positioning of the mode-elements, matters, it has meaning-effects. The
placing of the elements of image and writing on the space of the screen (or of the
page) matters because that placing expresses principles of visual