Kress on page to screen

Discussion board post from 15th November 2008:

This thread's a bit .. um ... threadbare so I thought I'd post something. I'll try to answer Julia's question but will finish on a rant ...

I struggled with this activity a bit as I couldn't readily apply what I'd read to the Shrek and HP web sites. There didn't seem to be an obvious connection between the Halliday (about early years language development and learning) and Kress (about images and learning) texts.

The Introduction to the grammar of visual design, heavily informed by Kress and van Leeuwen's Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, looked a much more relevant text, with lots of concepts to apply to a 'reading' of the two sites.

Reading Kress (draft chapter not interview) again though, a few lines struck me;

As the screens are becoming simultaneously the sites of multimodal texts, these are becoming read in accordance with the spatial logic of image.

The point he's making is that images - and screen-based texts operating according to the "spatial logic of the image" - don't necessarily have a fixed reading path; there are multiple lines of inquiry readers can follow according to their needs/preferences.

Our two web sites allow this via a menu/site structure that encourages random clicking until you alight upon stuff that floats your boat.

Kress cites another writer that makes this very point:

... information is material which is selected by individuals to be transformed by them into knowledge to solve a problem in their life-world’ (Boeck, 2003)

In a non-linear text - and a screen-based one whose underlying logic is that of the image is non-linear - users can make selections that are personally meaningful; they don't have to read the whole lot.

The final extract I found interesing is this one:

To return to reading just for one moment: in the former situation, reading aimed to gain truth to the original authority of the text, which delivered knowledge; now reading aims for a truth which arises out of the individual’s interest. The former is now unlikely to deliver relevant knowledge; the latter can. Indeed, reading is now close to the making of the text: it is sign-making on the basis of engagement with materials ‘in the world’.

Kress sets up a binary: print-based texts are all about authorial authority and author-controlled meaning; screen-based texts are spaces where authority has been decentred and where meaning making resides with the reader.'Then' readers had to make do with pushy writers deciding what was meaningful; 'now' readers can select, filter, combine and make meaning.

I'm not so sure about this. I think readers of print-based texts have always made personally relevant meanings of the texts they read; Emma Bovary reading herself in the fiction of Walter Scott, Roland Barthes reading himself in the work of Proust or the adolescent reading his/her life in current teen fiction or film.

And do we always read linear print-based texts in a linear way? I read The Old Curiosity Shop a few years ago and found myself skipping the drippy, Victorianly sentimental chapters featuring Little Nell and her grandad so I could get back to the funny-grotesque chapters with Quilp and Dick Swiveller.

I don't lose agency just because I pick up a book; I don't gain it because I log onto a computer. Is there a chapter to be written on 'Kress and technological determinism'?

Reflection and rant over. I'm going to have a nice cup of tea and a lie down now ...