Time and Space

                Certain statements Professor Downs made early in the semester are just now starting to make sense to me after reading Stephen A. Bernhardt’s “Seeing the Text,” namely that certain media proceed with a function of time while others proceed as a space to navigate and that certain media afford localized availability while others do not. However, if my memory serves, I think Downs treated linear text as having localized availability while Bernhardt states, “one must actually read what is written to get any sense of how one point is related to the next” (68). If we treat Gunther Kress’s “Multimodality, Multimedia, and Genre” as a space to be navigated, though, we can soon see the merit in Downs’s statement.

I think I became nearly ill from consuming Kress’s reiterations when all he really had to say for my sake is the following: “If we contrast the two examples, they are nearly an inversion of each other: in the first, the written part of the text is realist; in the second it is schematic-theoretical; in the first text, the visual part is theoretical/abstract, while in the second it is empirical/realist” (47). The aforementioned couple with the statement, “What is important is to recognize that texts realize, among other things, the kinds of social relationship pointed to here” (44), would have served to make a similar point to that which he stretched across about 8 pages. Nevertheless, Kress does say something that brings me back on point: “each mode, writing and image, does distinctly different and specific things. The specificity is the same at one level: the affordance of the logic of time governs writing, and the affordances of the logic of space governs the image” (47).

The visually informative text from Bernhardt’s essay affords the logic of both time and space, which makes it more accommodating for a greater variety of readers. It is relevant to a vaster audience and can be multi-purposeful as well. Because of its increased functionality, I would initially think that all text should be written as such, but increased functionality comes with learning the language of visual representation. The laws of gestalt are just a starting point. Hell, I didn’t even know what gestalt meant, let alone all the subtle meanings implicit in visual representation. As the affordances of visual representation are more widely accepted, a shift in pedagogy must occur to provide students with the knowledge necessary to produce and interpret these more effective kinds of texts.