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Electronic Term Paper
Multi-Modality & The Electronic
Writing Space
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Potentials of Semiotics &
Multi-Modality
There is a critical difference between the literary
writing space and its electronic component, contrary to Bolter’s claim
that
“[a] printed book consists
of words on a page. When we read the words, they give rise in our minds to
representations of the world, of imagined worlds, or of abstract ideas.
When we read words or examine illustrations in a hypertext on the computer
screen, we have the same experience.”1
The experience for the reader is never the same as
reading a book. Hypertext has been developed for the purpose of achieving
new experiences for both the reader and the writer, and this is evident in
Landow’s support for the promise of hypertext to “embody and thereby
test aspects of theory, particularly those concerning textuality,
narrative, and the roles or functions of reader and writer.”2
Hypertext opens up innovations in the field of writing, such as the use of
hyperlinks and the juxtapositioning of materials in written, visual and
aural forms. There are implications for these advantages to written text
in the multimodal arena of hypertext, which includes visual information,
sound, animation, and other forms of data.
Besides content, visual (and even audio)
presentation are now of equal if not more importance for the author. Kress
has noted that
“after a period of some two to three
hundred years of the dominance of writing as the means of communication
and representation, there is now, yet again, a deep shift taking place in
the system of media and modes of representation and communication, and the
system of evaluating these.”3
With this shift towards the increasing dependence on images and sounds to
convey information, hypertext seems to be the platform for authors to
express their creativity and share their knowledge. This proposition is
supported by Kress who says “[i]nformation that displays what the world is
like is carried by the image; information that orients the reader to that
information is carried by language.”4 While this is becoming true with the
semiotic potentials of the electronic writing space, there never should
come the day when the scales are totally tipped, leaving language to fend
alone.
Although hyperspace is still a textual medium, the aspects of fonts,
colours, size and animation come into play for the electronic writing
space. The modality of text, however, is foregrounded with the
introduction of visual and aural modalities. The visual composition of any
type of message represents a large part of its meaning, and that is often
supported by the cliché “A picture paints a thousand words”. However, in
this time and age, it is more accurate to say that it can paint a thousand
different words. This convergence of the various modalities holds many
prospects for future of hypertext.
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