A Little Take-Away from "The Future of Literacy"

The world seen through images is nothing like the world narrated through writing. The evolving dominance of writing to the dominance of image in the various domains of the world is one that is still debatable today. Much of what is discussed by Kress in this week's reading led me to conclude that the integration of writing and image is still the best be in communicating meaning. The way writing (text in its conventional definition) and image (still and what is prevalent today, moving images/videos) support each other produces the potential for viewers/readers to make meaning. This meaning making process however situates one in the domain of their social context.

For example, the following video by National Council of Problem Gambling (Singapore) takes on the perspective a father.

Just by viewing the moving images before reading the text (writing) at the end of the video, one who lacks the social context or prior knowledge will not be able to decipher the intended meaning that the image maker is trying to communicate because the semiotic potential of images are such that it is open to interpretation and that the reader has the authority to hypothesise the content. The text at the end of the video, "Often people who suffer from problem gambling aren't the gamblers", however, demands the reader to make an epistemological commitment to it in which readers are forced to attribute those who are not gamblers as suffers of problem gambling. Independently, the text and image produce different effects on readers.

Hence, this video illustrates why I feel that integration of writing and image is the best bet when one seeks semiotic potential because when both writing and image co-exist, people are able to contextualise and make a more accurate meaning of what the image maker is trying to deliver. On a hindsight, as much as one can imagine from the text who are the ones sufferings, the affordance of an image has limited it to the daughter of a father who is in need of her piggy bank's money. Thus, here I concur that both modes, writing and image, have their strengths and limitations as mentioned in Kress (p.4) and that the meaning maker (text maker), when designing their products, will have to carefully approximate the reader's interpretation.

Dominance of image or more evidently, a visual spectrum of meaning making potential calls for an urgent restructuring of today's education system. Learning about the changes in Singapore's English curriculumn (2010) which caters to the skills of visualising and representing signals the government's recognition of the changing world. As mentioned in the NLG reading earlier this semester, we have to indeed prepare our children for tomorrow's worl where reading images is prevalent. However, cultural pessimists, the political and cultural elites, as suggested by Kress seem reluctant to make the switch. Writing seem to still be their domincant mode of communication despite the evolving dominance. Honestly, I agree with their stance to a certain extent simply because some issues in the world today are best preserved in writing. For example, Memorandum of Understandings, asset deeds and etc...However, a little thought in me was wondering would it be possible to integrate images in these "serious documents"? Will image lower the modalityof the writer's intention. Imagine a warrant of arrest or summons being integrated or designed with images that exemplifies the text maker's intention. How bizzare~

Well, at the end of the day, I believe that texts which are designed on a multimodal platform, whether aimed as fitness for purpose, shaping of knowledge, epistemological commitments or causality, are capable of affording as many potential meanings as readers possibly can interpret because mode is inseparable from cultural, social, affective and cognitive matters.