Literacy in the New Media Age

by Gunther Kress

In this 'new media age' the screen has replaced the book as the dominant medium of communication. This dramatic change has made image, rather than writing, the centre of communication. In this groundbreaking book, Gunther Kress considers the effects of a revolution that has radically altered the relationship between writing and the book. Taking into account social, economic, communication and technological factors, Kress explores how these changes will affect the future of literacy. Kress considers the likely larger-level social and cultural effects of that future, arguing that the effects of the move to the screen as the dominant medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in terms of power - and not just in the sphere of communication. The democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies will, Kress contends, have the widest imaginable consequences. Literacy in the New Media Age is suitable for anyone fascinated by literacy and its wider political and cultural implications. It will be of particular interest to those studying education, communication studies, media studies or linguistics.

Genres: Education, Linguistics, Nonfiction, Research, Language

204 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2003

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the first page of this book Kress says, “The world told is a different world to the world shown.” You know, if I was a smartarse I could say that pretty much sums up this book and leave this review there. But really, his opening quote just whets our appetite.

We almost know that we are on the cusp of some sort of change, but we aren’t necessarily all that clear about what the change is going to be. If you live in Australia you only need to open up The Australian newspaper (a similar effect can be had by opening any of Murdoch’s ‘quality’ newspapers anywhere else in the world) and reading an article on ‘declining educational standards’, on the ‘need to return to basics’. Somehow ‘basics’ also means Shakespeare – poor old Shakespeare, he was only trying to make a living out of amusing people.

What is particularly interesting, though, is that the authors of these articles save their most furious vitriol for students learning about texts that are film or contain images, rather than printed books. Books, that is, which are solely made up of letters joined together into words to be read from left to right. These are the only texts worthy of any serious consideration. That very few of these students will ever read another book once they have left school is, also according to these people (although, truth be told, they do tend to be men – you know, rather than people). And even this refusal by people to read can be blamed on poor teaching.

But the violent certainty of this reactionary response shows us that the change that is happening must be deep and fundamental while also presenting a challenge to the existing order. If it did not do this it could be laughed aside. Not just that, but the deficiencies of such a concern with ‘non-canonical texts’ would be as blatantly apparent to everyone as they must be to these authors. And yet, teachers persist in teaching multimodal texts.

The point is that the move to screen based texts, rather than page based ones, presents us with a fundamental change in our relationship to texts. These new genres are not just ‘back-lit books’. A webpage works in quite different ways to how a book’s page works. The problem is that languages that are based on alphabets have a very particular notion of how texts work – especially book texts. Books are seen as essentially frozen speech. Letters are seen as captured sounds – so much so that if you were to ask someone who speaks English how many vowels there are they are just as likely to say something incredibly stupid like, ‘there are five’. As Kress points out, “English has five letters for representing, depending on how we analyse them, about twelve vowel sounds (not counting diphthongs and triph-thongs.” Alphabetic languages imagine that writing is really just speech, but what it doesn’t recognise is that speech is actually quite different from writing. Speech has many ‘affordances’ (it can do stuff) that writing simply can’t. For example, I can stress certain words by speaking louder or pausing just after a certain word, or raising the tone of my voice as I say it – none of which are easy to represent in written texts.

And writing can do stuff that simply can’t be done in speech. You can be much more complex in written texts than you can get away with in spoken texts, because your reader can glance back if they need to. But paradoxically, you often need to be much more clear in written texts than in spoken ones, as you can’t read the face of your reader as you write, as you can read the face of your listener as you speak. While you speak the face of your listener can let you know when to slow down, when to repeat a point, when to make things clearer. Your reader has no such ability.

Writing and speech are different – and writing and images are different too. Writing and images have different affordances too. In fact, Kress makes the point that words and images are pretty much opposites in many ways. Words are essentially empty when we are first introduced to them, and it is only as we engage with them that they become increasingly filled with meaning. As he says, “If someone says to me ‘I have a new car', I know very little indeed about that person's vehicle.” But if someone shows me a photo of their car I get a much better idea of that car. So, words are relatively empty containers and images are relatively full.

Words also need to come at us, in English at least, following a relatively strict grammar determining the word order. Word order is very important. The cat ate the mouse and the mouse ate the cat may have all the same elements, but they hardly mean the same thing. But it isn’t just this – words in order give us notions of causality. The subject-verb-object order of words in English implies causality between these elements in the very structure of the grammar of the language. Written language is temporal – you need to read it in a particular order and that order needs to be read in time. And time is how cause and effect play out too.

But think of an image now. It isn’t always immediately obvious how we should start to ‘read’ an image. It certainly isn’t the case that we start top left and zigzag our way across the image until we reach the bottom. I feel fairly confident in saying that we never do that with any image we look at and understand.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t get meaning from images. It also doesn’t mean that there isn’t a kind of grammar to reading images – see his other book, Reading Images, for a better notion of this grammar. What it does mean is that the kinds of meanings we are likely to get from images are going to be different from the kinds of meanings we will get from written texts.

If written texts are temporal, it seems fair to assume that images will be spatial. If written texts are sequential, images are a gestalt (something that you understand as a whole). These are really quite fundamental differences – and this means that you can use each to explain various types of information. That is, written texts and images are simply better at conveying different kinds of information. It isn’t that you can’t express the same information with them both (actually, I would argue that you can’t, but for argument’s sake let’s leave that for a minute) but that some things are easier to explain in one than in the other.

So, to make this boringly obvious – if I want to tell you about my new car, pulling out a photograph of it really will be worth a thousand words, probably even more. But if I want to let you know how well it handles going around corners or how long it takes to get from 0 to 100 km/h – well, a couple of words are probably going to be worth a thousand pictures.

So what, you say. Well, this is where we need to come back to the fact that we are at a time of change. Kress says, “This book is about alphabetic writing. It appears, however, at a moment in the long history of writing when four momentous changes are taking place simultaneously: social, economic, communicational and technological change.” Up until a few decades ago (and from the 1600s before that), the book reigned supreme. So much so that we could be forgiven for believing that images were virtually devalued in the Western canon – mostly reserved for the illiterate. Hence our friends who write opinion pieces for Murdoch’s evil empire – the kinds of people who say that learning about the interactions of text and image is a return to primary school and picture books.

However, what do you notice about this little piece of high art?

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Ezra Pound

Ok, so I cheated, this is the standard example of ‘imagist’ poetry – still, the point I’m making is pretty clear. We are having images slammed at us here at 30 letters a second. As Kress says in this book and elsewhere, all modes of communication are and have always been multimodal.

The difference today is that we are moving from mostly written texts, texts that come in genres that follow the natural order, the temporality of written texts, to texts that are mostly represented on screens. And as such these new texts are centrally and most importantly designed to be ‘read’ as images first and foremost.

Think of your average webpage. How you arrive at it isn’t in the least bit the same as how you arrive at a particular page in a book. Webpages are much more ‘choose your own adventure’. And even how you approach a webpage isn’t the same as how you approach a page in a book. There are, like in a painting, various pathways in and the possibility that no two people will ever ‘read’ quite the same webpage.

A webpage is often a gestalt rather than a strict sequence. And like a painting you need to see it as a whole before you can understand how its elements all work together. And only then can you look in detail at some of the elements, even if you will ignore others. If there are both words and images – the words will tend to play a secondary role. And they will be simpler sentences than they might otherwise have been on a page of a book.

But what is most interesting about this is that this fundamental change in how we construct communicative texts, this movement towards images based texts over word based ones, is happening at a time of substantial change in our society. And this movement to image based texts is anything but settled. Like in all new genres, the hand of the old texts, the old ways of doing things, rests heavily on the new. So, it isn’t just the reactionaries who get paid by Rupert that are stuck in the old ways of doing things – we all are, because the full affordances of the new genres just aren’t settled or clear yet. And so there is room for different groups – perhaps groups who are relatively powerless in the world that is currently passing away – to have a greater say in this new world. The old strictures, the old ways of saying things, ways of saying things that required a wealth of knowledge so as to be able to understand and to show distinction and good taste, are becoming increasingly anachronistic. Out of their time, they seem somehow both old fashioned and cumbersome beside the clearer and easier to assimilate new texts.

I would love to think that there will always be space for a well constructed sentence – and, part of me does believe there always will be. Just as with radio not being killed off by television – there is room for all genres and all modes and all media. But the centre of gravity is shifting. There is no going back – we need to understand how image based texts work – understand the semiotic and semantic possibilities of such texts, understand the grammar of reading such texts, or we leave ourselves open to being manipulated by those who create these new texts, people who understanding precisely how these texts can be used to manipulate us.

As an introduction to coming to understand multimodal texts and how they work to communicate meaning, this book serves an essential purpose. A good and simply written book about an incredibly important topic.

[Aimée]

Kress writes in the preface that we have come to a moment in the long history of writing when four momentous changes are taking place simultaneously: social, economic, communicational, and technological. The combined effects of these are so profound that it is justifiable to speak of a revolution in the landscape of communication” (Kress, 2003, 9). He foretells that “the combined effects on writing of the dominance of the mode of image and of the medium of the screen will produce deep changed in the forms and functions of cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on the forms and shapes of knowledge (1). He goes so far as to state that: “It is possible to see writing becoming subordinated to the logic of the visual in many or all of its uses. Kress claims that new spaces and new strategies will be needed. “There is a consequence for notions of meaning: if the meaning of a message is realised, ‘spread across,’ several modes, we need to know on what basis this spreading is happens, what principles are at work. Equally, in reading, we need to gather meaning from all the modes which are co-present in a text, and new principles of reading will be at work. Making meaning in writing and making meaning in reading both have to be newly though about” (35). He further explains: “The means of dealing with meaning are different; we need to understand how meanings are made as signs in distinct ways in specific modes, as the result of the interest of the maker of the sign, and we have to find ways of understanding and describing the integration of such meanings across modes, into coherent wholes, into texts” (37).

Kress delves deeply into the changing nature of word and image–in order to show that human engagement with the world is changing. I believe this is where a useful theory of aesthetic experience can fit. Aesthetic experience does not favor the visual over anything else. Does not favor print over anything else. It is more or less an unhierarchical model of experience. Toward the end of this book Kress explains what is needed is a requisite theory of meaning: “The major task is to imagine the characteristics of a theory which can account for the processes of making meaning in the environments of multimodal representation in multi-mediated communication, of cultural plurality and of social and economic instability.” This theory will look different from ones of the past. It will not assume language as its foundation. Instead, the centrality of language “will be replaced with an understanding that modes of representation are used in relation to a multiplicity of factors, such as the sign-maker’s sense of what are the apt modes of representing, given a certain audience and therefore specific relations between sign-maker and audience. Out of this awareness of the always rhetorical task of communication arises the arrangement of modes which are in play in a message/text.” (169).

Also, he comments on the shift to design: “The notion of competence will give way to that of interested design: …Design, by contrast, starts from the interest and the intent of the Designer to act in a specific way in a specific environment, to act with a set of available resources and to act with an understanding of what the task at hand is, in relation to a specific audience. Design is prospective,future-oriented,: in this environment, with these (multiple) resources, and out of my interests now to act newly I will shape a message. In design, resources are transformed in any number of ways–whether in new combinations of modes or in the constant transformative action by signmakers in producing newly made signs” (169).

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

IThis is an important book. It's also really hard reading. If you're not into theories about literacy or semiotics but you want an overview, you'd be well advised to find some of his articles instead.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another "work" text - but one that strongly is influencing how I'm seeing literacy, learning 2.0, etc.

[Joe Sacksteder]

Great book, foundational for my PhD exam year. I'm still confused, however, about the difference between genre, mode, and medium.