Back when I was schooled in journalism, the reporters typed copy on sheets of yellow copypaper. The copyeditor used a pencil to designate corrections and indicate font, italics, boldface, etc. At that point, the copy was sent to the production department where another person would set the type, another would make the plate, and another would operate the press. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, in their book Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, point out how these kinds of boundaries are rapidly fading in a world where technology has blurred such divisions.
As these divisions of labor have fallen, so have similar divisions in the ways in which meaning is expressed and conveyed. Kress and Van Leeuwen point out that textbooks which formally relied on language alone to convey their material now consist of mixes of text, charts, pictures. They claim that the notion that language alone is the sole way of making meaning is incorrect. Meaning, they say, is created through multiple modalities through discourse, design, production, and distribution.
As multimodal expression becomes more accessible for everyone, people will need to speak the language of these various modes. Paul Hammond, Director of Digital Initiatives at Rutgers University, recognizes this. In his classes, students are each given a $100 video recorder which they use to create multimedia compositions. Using software that lets them edit and produce quality short movies, student arguments use images, sound, video, pictures, and words to make their points. One argument incorporates images from the Civil Rights Movement and Hurricane Katrina while Martin Luther King narrates his I Have a Dream Speech. When presenting the assignment, Hammond tells his students to “think about what you want people to see in your mind’s eye.”
As the technology involved in producing these kinds of assignments becomes less expensive and more user-friendly, Hammond foresees more and more classrooms using multimedia assignments in place of traditional ones such as research papers. He says the point is to use multimedia to engage students in “idea driven conversation.”
