response to kress (35-83)

“Making meaning in writing and making meaning in reading both have to be newly thought about” (35).

This quote from Kress goes along with what we were talking about in terms of the way we defined (or redefined) literacy in class last Tuesday. The concept of literacy is more than simply knowing how to read a text (a term whose definition Kress asks us to reconsider as the screen has overtaken the page as the dominant media of “texts” in the era of new media—“A theory that deals with multimodality comes up against the need for a usable definition of text, given that our present sense of text comes from the era of the dominance of the mode of writing, and the dominance of the medium of the book” 36). Literacy is also comprehension and more importantly the ability to appropriately, effectively and creatively convey a message to an audience whether through words, images, a combination of both, etc. Kress refers back to this concept over and over again in different ways throughout these two chapters. He talks about literacy in terms of an “author’s” ability to know the situation, know his audience and then know how to frame and deliver the message in way that is effective under those very particular circumstances—in other words to be literate is to be aware of the rhetorical situation (39, 49, 50). This is applies whether the “author” is a writer, a designer, etc.—anyone who creates “texts” in Kress’s interpretation of the word.

I particularly liked Kress’s explanation of the signifier and signified. He notes that different people understand a signified object or concept differently when that object or concept is represented by the same signifier (e.g. Kress’s tree example). Although he never talks about Burke, Kress’s discussion about the way we make meaning, the way we understand the world around us is similar to Burke’s terministic screens—the way we understand and make meaning is dependent on the terms we use to describe things, and the interpretation of these terms is different for different people.