Page 81 - Literacy in the New Media Age

70 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

meaning in the culture, in this mode, can be and will be used, if it serves the
needs of the maker of the message.
Let me give one last example which shows the resource of spatial
placement used for meanings which may be directly political – it is of course,
like all representation, always ideological. In 1997 sovereignty over the then
Crown Colony of Hong Kong reverted to the government of the People’s
Republic of China. We know that semiotic resources are culturally shaped,
placement in space being no exception. One feature of this is the directionality of
writing systems. Chinese was traditionally written in columns from top to bottom
and from right to left. More recently, under the influence of ‘the West’ this has
changed somewhat, in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong (in Japan also), so that in
these places the semiotics of directionality of ‘West’ and ‘East’ coexist and
intermingle. Anyone who looks at advertisements while waiting for the
underground train in Hong Kong will quickly notice this.
It would be reasonable to assume that as with other semiotic resources, this
would be used in accordance with the structures of power, so that while Hong
Kong was under British rule the spatial semiotics of the colonial rulers might
rule also. Here is a sign from a road that runs at the top of the Peak, a highly
select residential area of Hong Kong (see Figure 5.4).
My assumption was – I took the photograph in early 1999, some two years
after the ‘changeover’ – that this was the semiotic system of the colonial rulers,
among whom some of the best off lived in houses on the Peak. Figure 5.5
(overleaf) shows a sign from the walking path that circles the Peak. My
assumption was that here we have the Chinese spatial semiotic system at work.
This is reinforced by the appearance of what may be the Cantonese deixis of
take/bring in the English version of the message. The mixing of semiotic
resources is evident in many of the signs on the Peak, as indeed everywhere in
Hong Kong. Along this path (which connects with an extensive network of trails
on the island), popular with locals who come up for a few hours, are distance
markers. The Chinese semiotic dominates in the directionality of the figure of the
walker Figure 5.6 (overleaf). On signs in England he would be walking from left
to right. The Western semiotic dominates the numerical indicator, and the
English writing, and the Chinese writing, when horizontally written, also runs
from left to right. I cannot tell whether the Chinese or the English semiotic rules
in the placement of figures and other information: a western reading would say
that the ‘real’ information is at the bottom, and that the ‘ideal’ is represented by
the figure of the walker. I can imagine that a Chinese reading might differ from
that.
In the subtle and complex politics of the recent history of Hong Kong one
could undertake an archaeology of power and shifts in power by looking at these
signs – whether on the Peak Tram, in the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, or
the signs on public buildings; wherever public declarations are made which need
to be sensitive to such matters. In the era of multimodality these issues have