Page 76 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 65

grammar through which this now visual entity is organised. A simple example is
the ‘caption’, where it clearly matters whether the verbal caption is placed near
to the visual element or more distantly, or whether it is placed at the top, at the
bottom, to the left or to the right, within the same frame, within the visual element
or outside.
It is now important to focus on each kind of element with equal attention at
some level: on the letter as much as on word, sentence or complete text. But not
just that: the placement of letter or word, the shape of the letter or its size, all
these now need to be treated as signs. Now that the logic of image dominates on
the screen certainly but increasingly also on the page, and now that frequently
the elements of writing occur in a subsidiary role to image, it may be the case that
a letter in itself has significance at the visual level, or that a word occurs simply
as a subsidiary part of an image, a caption. Figure 5.2 is an instance of such a
word–image relation.
On this ‘page’ writing is very much the subsidiary mode, and it is reduced to
the function of label. Here the caption at the highest textual level is bolded, its
significance is marked by visual means; it is placed close to the item for which it
acts as label, so spacing – also an aspect of the visual – indicates that meaning.
In the high era of writing, when the logic of writing dominated the page, the
organisation of the page was not an issue. Now that organisation has become one
resource for the meaning of the new textual ensembles. These meanings derive
from the meanings of the mode of the visual, from the meanings of visual
‘grammar’. It becomes necessary therefore to say something about visual
grammar. My brief excursion into etymology at the start of the chapter indicates
why I am happy to use the term grammar, despite the danger of being accused of
applying linguistic terminology to images. I feel confident about reappropriating
the word for a much wider use in semiotic discussion of all modes of meaning-
making, where the term can have real uses. In that new sense grammar is for me
the overarching term that can describe the regularities of a particular mode which
a culture has produced, be it writing, image, gesture, music or others.
The points made here draw directly on the grammar of images set out in
Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. The assumption – following
the semiotic theory of Michael Halliday – is that any fully functioning human
semiotic resource must have the potential to meet three demands: to represent
states of affairs or events in the world – the ideational function; to represent the
social relations between the participants in the process of communication – the
interpersonal function; and to represent all that as a message-entity, a ‘text’
which is internally coherent and which coheres with its environment – the
textual function.
Take, as an example, the utterance ‘it’s cold in here’. The state of affairs it
represents or reports is about temperature in an enclosed space. Grammatically it
is a declarative, so something is being declared by someone to someone else;
semantically it is a statement, something is being stated by someone to someone
else. Both of these produce a specific social relation: of someone who can