| … there are eleven ‘entry points’, which themselves respond to or perhaps reflect the interests of potential ‘visitors’ […] The significant point […] is that ‘reading’ is now a distinctly different activity to what it was in the era of the traditional page. Reading is the imposing of the reader’s order on this entity, an order which, while of course responding to what is here, derives from criteria of the reader’s interest, disposition and desire. This is reading as ordering. Even when I have decided to enter via a category on the menu, it is my choice which category I choose to enter. (Kress, 2003; p. 138)
The combined effects on writing of the dominance of the mode of image and of the medium of the screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of writing. This in turn will have profound effects on human, cognitive/affective, cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on the forms and shapes of knowledge. The world told is a different world to the world shown. The effects of the move to the screen as the major medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in relations of power, and not just in the sphere of communication. Where significant changes to the distribution of power threaten, there will be fierce resistance by those who presently hold power, so that the predictions about the democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies have to be seen in the light of inevitable struggles over power yet to come. It is already clear that the effects of the two changes taken together will have the widest imaginable political, economic, social, cultural, conceptual/cognitive and epistemological consequences. (Kress, 2003; p. 1) |
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