Use Your Words?

“Where before, up until twenty or thirty years ago, writing carried all the communicational load of a message, and needed to have grammatical and syntactic structures that were equal to the complexities of that which had to be represented in that single mode, now there is a specialization which allows each of the modes to carry that part of the message for which it is best equipped” (Kress, 49).

After that quote, it kind of makes me glad that we have other means of communicating meaning. There are so many ways for someone to get lost in that sentence; the clauses lead you into other ideas and then abruptly come back to the main idea with a sort of odd syntax that makes you go back and have to read it again without the clauses. Of course, there are a million of other ways to confuse meaning with language. 

Such as poor word choice.

What if we could think about images and multimedia as clauses to the whole of a text? While in some cases they can strengthen an argument, add more interesting details and side notes, they can also cause confusion if not deployed correctly. This goes back to McCloud, in how images and text can correspond with each other and rely on or enhance each other's meaning for their own. It also goes back again to the idea of literacy – we learn certain genres in order to help us understand where to look for the most prominent meaning or what to expect about the flow and organization of an essay.

I think the main point that these authors are trying to make is that form follows function. Or that it should. When we start using computers and multimedia to make our point, we can't simply keep using the same ideas that we apply to written text – they do not fully correspond. It limits us in ways that I can't even fully describe. However, computer technologies allow for us to change the form in such ways as to create new meaning. We can blow up all ideas of genre by stretching them to their limit (which avant garde art tries to do)– however, since we need the form of the genre in order to make meaning out of it, we risk losing some meaning because people would not be able to understand it.

How do I even begin to understand this, and why would I need to

The important thing to consider, as Kress pointed out a few paragraphs up, is that each mode has a specific thing that it is especially good at. Text is great at portraying action, time, at being extremely abstract but understandable at the same time – while image can help the reader come to immediate conclusions or understand an exact representation that text may be describing.

Considering all of these things, design becomes even more important. If we want to allow all of our texts and images and ideas to come across with their full potential in meaning, then we have to understand the functions of all of our objects within a text – the meaning behind having text and image on the same page, the size of images in relation to each other, fonts and texts used, online availability for hyperlinks, the experience of the reader through the text, etc, etc, etc.