Page 78 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 67

assignation of roles of someone who might confirm or disconfirm, and
someone who needs that confirmation. The utterance reports something, and
does so in the so-called present tense, which has the effect of suggesting ‘this is’,
rather than ‘it might feel like that (because you’re sitting still)’. Lastly, the
utterance is internally coherent, for instance in the sense that the statement ‘it’s
cold’ coheres with the adverbial of place ‘in here’; and it coheres (or does not!)
with the immediate environment both of the conversation (say, a preceding ‘I
think I’ll put on something warm’), and of the physical environment, the room in
which it is spoken.
For the purposes of thinking about written word/image ensembles, only one of
these needs to be considered at the moment. That is the textual function: how do
the elements which make up the text-ensemble cohere in the space of page or
screen, and what meaning attaches to their spatially constructed relations?
Traditionally, this is what is meant by ‘layout’, though layout tended not to be
seen in terms of making a contribution to meaning. The questions are, ‘how are
they placed together, and how do they cohere?’, and ‘what meaning derives from
this particular arrangement?’ This is the level at which word arrangements (as
graphic blocks) and images (as graphic blocks) interact.
In the ‘Visual Biology’ example above, the lower-level relations are marked
by connecting lines, the higher-level ones use proximity. There is use of the
device of bolding to indicate salience, as a means of indicating semiotic
equivalence – equivalence in the sense of ‘elements operating at the same level’.
In a page from a geology textbook, the relations might exist between word-
blocks and image-blocks. It is of course strange to think of a block of written text
as a ‘graphic block’. But in these new textual arrangements that is what they are.
At the first level of analysis, whether the formal analysis of theoretical work or
the informal analysis of everyday reading and viewing, we are dealing with the
mode of layout and its elements. These entities exist as ‘graphic blocks’,
elements in the mode of layout. The ‘blocks’ might be realised by material from
any other mode: writing, image, diagram. At the next level ‘down’ we then ask
questions about the mode-specific characteristics of these elements. At this level
we are concerned with the blocks in terms of their mode – writing or image.
It may seem strange to think in terms of ‘blocks’ rather than immediately of
meanings; it is in fact no different than when we play with syntactic meanings in
speech or writing, without paying attention to word-meaning. If I say ‘oggles
igged twuddles’ everyone who understands English will know that the oggles did
something that affected the twuddles. From there I would be able to say, ‘Oh,
you mean the twuddles were igged, then?’ I would know that on this occasion at
least, the oggles were iggers of twuddles, and so on. There are structural
relations which have a regularity and have a meaning. The relations and the
regularity together ensure the meaning – in speech, in writing, in image, in
gesture and, here, in layout.
For all modes, the regularities are culture-specific. Image is not directly and
transparently a representation of the world which is represented. My comments