Multimodal & Multimedia

• To bridge the gap between multimedia and multimodal, it may be helpful to see how the two concepts overlap and how they differ.

Claire Lauer

Claire Lauer does this thoroughly in her 2009 Computers and Composition article entitled "Contending with Terms: 'Multimodal' and 'Multimedia' in the Academic Public Spheres.

In this article, Lauer argues that term preference depends on both context and audience. That is, academic and non-academic contexts play a key role in how each term is valued.

• According to Lauer in the classroom the emphasis is on multimodal whereas in non academic environments the emphasis is more multimedia.

And even though multimodal may be more appropriate for the work done within the composition classroom, Lauer argues that composition teachers should continue using both terms to better prepare students for how they may encounter multimedia outside academia

Another way to think about the differences in terms is defining "modes" and "media."

Lauer defines modes as the "ways of representing information," which include• words • sounds • images.

Media, then, are the "'tools and material resources' used to produce and disseminate texts," which include • books, • computers, • voices

Though this shows the differences between modes and media, these definitions allude to the interdependent nature of both terms.

"the media we use affect the ways in which we can realize meaning through various modes" Lauer is pulling from Gunther Kress here, arguing that our mode of writing is affected by which medium we choose to do that writing; thus, media and mode are always inextricably tied together.

KRESS AND VAN LEEUWAN

ON WRITING AND IMAGES

Writing itself is of course also a form of visual communication. Indeed, and paradoxically, the sign of the fully literate social person is the ability to treat writing completely as a visual medium

…for instance, not moving one’s lips and not vocalizing when one is reading, not even ‘subvocalizing’ (a silent ‘speaking aloud in the head’, to bring out the full paradox of this activity).

Readers who move their lips when reading, who subvocalize, are regarded as still tainted with the culturally less advanced mode of spoken language.

This kind of visual literacy (the ‘old’ visual literacy) has, for centuries now, been one of the most essential achievements and values of Western culture, and one of the most essential goals of education.

The distinction made by Western cultures has been that between literate (advanced) and non-literate (oral and primitive) cultures.

No wonder that the move towards a new literacy, based on images and visual design, can come to be seen as a threat, a sign of the decline of culture.

The fading out of illustrations in texts by and for children, then, is not a straightforward disvaluation of visual communication, but a valuation which gives particular prominence to one kind of visual communication, writing, and to one kind of visual literacy, the ‘old’ visual literacy.

Other visual communication is either treated as the domain of a very small elite of specialists, or disvalued as a possible form of expression for articulate, reasoned communication, seen as a ‘childish’ stage one grows out of.

This is not a valuation of language as such over visual communication.

Even now the structures, meanings and varieties of spoken language are largely misunderstood, and certainly not highly valued in the education system (with some exceptions, such as in formal ‘debating’) or in public forums of power.

To sum up: the opposition to the emergence of a new visual literacy is not based on an opposition to the visual media as such, but on an opposition to the visual media in situations where they form an alternative to writing and can therefore be seen as a potential threat to the present dominance of verbal literacy among elite groups.

• Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo, 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. pp. 15-16.