COMMUNICATION MAKING SENSE OF TEXT IMAGE

Contemporary Communication Making Sense Of Text Image And Meaning

Contemporary Communication Making Sense Of Text Image And Meaning

Digital media offer us the opportunity to describe the world and communicate with our surroundings in ways that have not previously existed. In particular have technologies connected with hyper linking and the mixing of media transformed the conditions for the creation of meaning. As broadband connection to the Internet becomes standard in homes, schools and offices, new opportunities for dynamic and "rich" forms of expression will seriously influence the different text genres of our culture. A common denominator with many of these forms of expression is that media forms that earlier appeared in separate media channels, now meet, mix and at times merge into new, distinctive media forms. They converge.

When written text, speech, photography, music, video and graphics are combined and integrated in digital texts, we are dealing not only with the convergence of media forms. On a more fundamental level it involves a convergence of semiotic systems, reading conventions and rhetorical patterns.

A considerable challenge faced by contemporary media producers, is to develop text and genre forms that fulfil their rhetorical tasks within these frames. How will multimedia-readers be informed, touched, persuaded and activated? At the same time a new form of literacy will be required by recipients. And not the least, researchers will have to test and challenge both new and existing theories and methods in their exploration of new genres. This article is intended as a contribution from the field of text research.

In the light of current broadband developments certain media formats are of particular interest, not the least the formats that combine writing and video. Such formats have for a long time been explored experimentally, e.g. within the production of educational CD-roms. But general usage has only arrived in the wake of broadband, so that is has become possible to distribute sound and video over the Internet, almost as swiftly as written text and images.

It is, on the other hand, not merely the possibilities of distribution that make text-video formats interesting. From a text theoretical perspective it is interesting because it entails a new phase in the development of multimodal types of text, i.e. types of text where different semiotic resources (writing, images, graphics, speech…etc) are combined and integrated.4 From the perspective of rhetoric, text-video formats are of interest because they make it possible to undertake rhetorical tasks that are not possible with traditional media formats. They represent in other words a new rhetorical potential. It should be obvious that these formats also are of significant educational interest, as they imply that educational material can be presented and treated in new ways.

When reading newspapers and magazines, we are rarely conscious of how interaction between words, images and graphical design influences our understanding of the issues presented. This form of multimodality is to a large extent conventionalised, and our ability to read such complex, but static media texts is so well developed that we read such texts ...