Monday, October 5, 2015

Affordances and Limitations of Culture and/as Affordances and Limitations of Media

A Summary
In Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen attempt to articulate a set of "common semiotic principles [that] operate in and across different modes" (2). Their focus on multimodal practices is significant insofar as it accentuates the unique and personalized ways in which composers actually enrich existing debates and conversations about communicative action in the ways that they navigate and acknowledge matters of discourse, design, production, and distribution, in the course of developing and delivering content. This approach, however, is as much concerned with the affordances and limitations that comprise various modes and media as the affordances and limitations imposed by particular cultures.

A Synthesis
As a great deal of my reading of Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen's Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication resonated with many of the ideas articulated in previous readings this semester, I felt it might be productive at this stage in the semester, to briefly touch on some of these resonances. Throughout Multimodal Discourse, Kress and Van Leeuwen comment on the changing landscape of communicative action, a landscape in which the seemingly exclusive and predominant practice of monomodality has been demystified in favor of a more fluid and variable landscape in which one can and does manipulate the semiotic components and mediational means available to them. In so doing, Kress and Van Leeuwen, like Jody Shipka in A Composition Made Whole, grant "analytic primacy" to mediated action, a move that very much extols the virtues of the profound rhetorical and cultural work accomplished by the "individual-interacting-with-mediational-means." Yet, for Kress and Van Leeuwen and Shipka, as well as for Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes in On Multimodality, placing an emphasis on the scope and breadth of mediated action and multimodal practices requires a more nuanced understanding of the "specific sociocultural contexts, bounded by intricacies of location, access, ability, and ideology," through which the mediational means emerge and acquire meaning. Without this sort of contextualized approch, Kress and Van Leeuwen remind us, we risk undermining and occluding the very real and profound ways in which composers add to the existing repertoire of available "grammars of design."

No comments:

Post a Comment