Reflections on Chapter 1 - JW

Reflections on Chapter 1
In the second paragraph, Kress makes these predictions: “Language-as-speech will remain the major mode of communication; language-as-writing will increasingly be displaced by image in many domains of public communication, though writing will remain the preferred mode of the political and cultural elites.” This means that access to higher spheres of influence will still be governed by mastery of these elite Discourses. Screen and image may be the Discourses of control, but writing and books will remain the Discourses of Power. Sure, you can make your own video and distribute it to the world, but the people who are really in control will still be the ones who have access to law and government and business. Citizens who are fluent in new media literacies but can’t read and write in the mode of dominant Discourses are ready to be controlled and victimized.
“ ‘The world narrated’ is a different world to ‘the world depicted and displayed’.” This is very true, but I disagree with some of the attributes that he identifies. Kress states that while text is most strongly temporal (one thing follows another), image is spatial. That’s true, but image is also temporal. If we are discussing ‘image’ here to include video, and I think we should, then one can’t discount the temporal aspect of image. The order in which elements of meaning are presented in a video have a large impact on meaning. You could argue that video is more strictly governed by the temporal than writing. Partially due to technological limits, it’s more difficult to skip around in video than in text. Written text allows you to set your pace, to reread as necessary, to scan and skim, and to skip to the sections of text that are most pertinent to you. With video, the viewer has less control of temporal elements. With images, I think it’s easier to embed messages that are consumed uncritically because it looks like unshaped reality.
By page 4, Kress is discussing further differences between writing and image. He says that the written word is “vacuous” and without meaning and the creative act is to associate those words with meaning. By contrast, he says that images are “filled with meaning” and the creative act is in arranging those meaning elements. I can’t agree with this completely. Images are not the things they depict. An image is just another representation of a thing. An image is closer to reality than a word (and subtext is easier to disguise in an image), but the image is still a container for meaning assigned from the outside. An image does contain literal level significance for the thing represented, but the really interesting (and powerful) part is not at the literal level.
There’s some great stuff on page 6, where Kress is describing how authorship changes in an environment where everyone can be an author. Call it the Wikipedia effect. Authorship used to imply authority. Very few could get published and the publishing process weeded out all but (supposedly) the most authoritative. Now, anyone can get published, so authorship, in and of itself, doesn’t mean squat. This is why we teach kids to be critical readers and why online critical literacy is so important. Anyone can get published. Citizens need to know how to weed through the ideas for themselves now.
Kress continues to discuss the changing role of authors and talks about the dissolution of the myth of original authorship. I know I should accept this. I know it’s probably true. But I’m not ready to let go of that idea of the author (in whatever medium) as the creative originator. I feel that writing is more than just rearranging and regurgitating the ideas of others. I’ve got to think more about that one.
Kress closes with an objection, and this is where I found myself strongly diverging from his opinions. He says that books today are not what books used to be, that textbooks are not what textbooks used to be. I’m reading the tone in this section as bitter nostalgia. He seems to say, “in my day, books were books - not like this junk you kids have today.” Is it true that textbooks, as a whole, were better thirty-five years ago? Actually, he doesn’t say that they were better. He says textbooks were “expositions of coherent ‘bodies of knowledge’ presented in the mode of writing” and that now a textbook is “a collection of ‘worksheets’, organised around the issues of the curriculum, and put between more or less solid covers.” He laments the loss of “that sense of a reader engaging with and absorbing a coherent exposition of a body of knowledge, authoritatively presented” and says that it has been replaced with activities that place students in action around a topic to learn by doing.
Two questions: Have textbooks changed in these ways in the last four decades? Is it a bad thing if they have?
I think I’d rather have kids learning-by-doing than “absorbing” knowledge from experts.
I liked Kress’ point about the age of the writers of websites. Yes, the internet is mostly text now, but most of the current internet is maintained by people who grew up with text as writing and the predominance of books. This may change as we die off.
As he closes the first chapter, Kress presents the ideas with which I most strongly disagree. He says that image has coexisted with writing in the past, but that image was subordinate to writing. “In simple terms, it fitted in how, where and when the logic of the written text and of the page suggested. In the era of the dominance of the screen, writing appears on the screen subject to the logic of the image.” This seems to me to be the wrong approach.
Both text and image serve meaning. An effective author uses the best tools available for a specific purpose. Sometimes text predominates and sometimes image does, but an effective author applies the strengths of the tools at hand to communicate a specific message to a specific audience.
Writing is an act of making meaning. Text and images should be employed to serve the purpose and message of the author. The “logic of text” shouldn’t preempt the message; nor should the “logic of screen”. When creating a web page, an author should start with message, then use whatever elements - text, image, sound, video - best suit the logic of the message. It’s true that there is a difference between “logic of text” and “logic of screen” and that the difference defines the possibilities of expression in each medium.
I don’t know. Now I’m starting to contradict myself. We need to seek answers to the questions that Kress puts forth in his closing paragraph, but I don’t have an inkling what those answers might be. I am put off by what sounds to me like an alarmist tone when discussing how literacy is changing. Change isn’t good or bad, it’s just inevitable. Living things change. This includes dynamic systems that act like living things, in this case language and culture. Does that mean we’re going to hell in a handbasket? It depends largely on what you mean by “we”. I think that a lot of people get up tight about changes in culture because they want the future to look like their past. It won’t. People will change the way institutions work, they’ll change the language to suit them, they’ll change laws and governments and anything else that they want to. We can’t impose ourselves on the future. We should discuss, we should debate, we should look for answers. But the answers are not a return to things past.

James