Page 79 - Literacy in the New Media Age

68 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

apply broadly to those Western cultures that I know – Germany,
Australia, France, the UK, the USA – even though there are differences between
these that need to be explored. In general, because of the long history of cultural
trade between cultures in Europe, these regularities have relative validity across
many European cultures, though the further one travels from the north-west of
Europe to the south-east, the less that is likely to be the case.
The resource which is used for making meaning in the visual mode is that of
(position in) space. In a framed space, say the rectangular space of the page or
the screen, elements can be placed at the bottom or at the top, to the left or to the
right, or in the centre. These positions have meaning-potential. In Western visual
tradition, though perhaps much more widely, given our body’s positioning in
space (‘feet on the ground’, ‘head in the air’) and the meanings which attach to
that, the meaning-potential of ‘bottom of the visual space’ and ‘top of the visual
space’ are broadly those of ‘grounded’, ‘of this earth’, ‘the empirical’ –
meanings which might be characterised as ‘real’. The meaning-potential of ‘top
of the space’ has broadly opposite values: ‘not of this earth’, ‘that which is
desired’ – meanings which might be characterised as ‘ideal’. These are meaning-
potentials, not meanings: literally, they are potentials for making meaning.
‘Real’ in a sixteenth-century religious painting may mean ‘of the earth’ or
‘secular’, whereas in a contemporary advertisement it might mean ‘what the
commodity is actually like’ and while in a scientific diagram it might mean ‘the
empirically real’. ‘Top’ in the religious painting may mean ‘of Heaven’,
‘divine’; in the advertisement the meaning might be ‘the benefits that you might
get through the use of the commodity’; in the scientific diagram it might mean
‘the abstract’, ‘the theoretical’, ‘the general’.
In Western alphabetic cultures – not, however, in alphabetic cultures such as
Arabic or Hebrew – the reading direction of written texts is from left to right.
This means that ‘left’ has a culturally different meaning-potential to ‘right’
(though it may be the case that left and right, just like top and bottom, derive
their meaning from historically earlier, semiotically and perhaps physiologically
more basic organisations). The left is ‘where we start from’, whether that is the
chapter or the line; it is ‘the starting point’. The right is then ‘the point to which
we are moving’, ‘where we will get to’. If the left is the starting point, it is also
where ‘we’ all are to begin with, it is the place ‘we’ know, and information that
is placed there is shared, known, ‘given’ in the (Hallidayan) terminology of
Reading Images.
This gives rise to a quadrant of differing meaning-potential as in Figure 5.3
(overleaf). Moving from bottom-left in clockwise direction, the meanings are
given/real, given/ideal, new/ideal and new/real. Placing elements in these
quadrants has significant effects. It makes a difference whether an image is to be
read, in a geography textbook, say, as ‘new’ and ‘real’, or as ‘given’ and ‘ideal’.
New and real could be an image showing a geological formation after a process
of faulting, with the formation as it was prior to the process of faulting on the
left, as given and real. ‘Given and ideal’ might be an abstract formulation, a