For Computers and Writing Blog (Literacy in the New Media Age)

Rethinking Reading

I'm sort of getting into the idea of literacy being multimodal. This form of literacy does require rethinking what reading is, and how we do it. At some point, reading will include other forms of 'writing/text', such as images, music, hyperlinks, etc. We have to learn how to read and understand something that is not written only alphanumerically. As Kress puts it, "either we treat 'reading' as a process which extends beyond (alphabetic) writing, and includes images for instance; or we restrict 'reading' to the mode of alphabetic writing quite strictly, and attend separately to how meaning is derived from images" (141).

The way that we read images are different from the way that we read alphabetic letters. When I think about graphics in texts there are words or directions that you follow to make sense of the story. For example, in an article or book where the text is the focus, the images are used as illustrations of the text. Sometimes the text makes references to the images (i.e. Figure 1.1), the image has a textual caption, or the text is wrapped around the image itself. In comics/graphic novels, the images are the focus and the text is used to help explain what is going on. In comics there is a sort of "reading path" that guides you from one panel to another which makes the reading fairly easy (156).

It confuses me when I try to read my friend's Manga novels, or any visual/graphic poetry. My brain doesn't want to change the way it is used to reading. The Manga novels are read right to left, and back to front. When I first opened one I was completely thrown off by the arrangement. The visual/graphic poems still throw me if they are too abstract. I can understand writing a poem about a tree in the shape of a tree, but to write something in a way that plays with negative space and the direction of the reading path. This made me think about what I wanted to do for my next essay. I was thinking of showing how images and text can combine to show the meaning of song lyrics. We'll see how it works out.