Week 10: Multimodality - Jewitt

According to Jewitt, the affordances of new technologies reconfigure the multimodal aspects of reading and writing in ways that are nearly significant for reading. This mean to say that with the ever changing technology, the way in which information are presented and read will never be fixed instead it will mirror the changes in technology.

As the valued form of literacy of schools is still linguistics, Jewitt claims that schools need to mediate the “in-school” and the “out of school” language. The out-of-school language tends to diverge away from the linguistics aspects of literacy that no longer place the importance of language.

It is interesting to note that the function of written language has instead been “relegated” to function as labels and captions as opposed to the traditional function of language as a mean to disseminate content; termed as decentring writing. The use of written language is being used minimally as seen in the illustration below.

However, the use of written language in games is seen as a sign of identity of the character. More often, the speech by these characters are incomprehensible, however with the inclusion of “voice” “constructs the character as human-like, literate and sociable”(Jewitt).

Apart from that too, Jewitt mentions on the importance of typography in the visualization of word. As writing is seen as a mean to convey information, even if one does not understand the language to make meaning, the placements of vowels for instance have a role to play in meaning making.
Typography, a category of language is use to segregate information. The fonts used seem to suggest the different types of information to be conveyed. For instance, the fonts used below seems to suggest something that is informal or even “childish”.

However, this example shows that the use of the font seems to suggest that the information to be conveyed is something formal and serious (apart from the title that says, formal script).

In summary, there are new and significant ways for reading and literacy. Apart from what had been mentioned earlier, the use of images with linguistic resources allows different readers to have different meaning when reading the text.

Just like the class activity that we did where we have to look at the best and worst sites, it is apparent that the meaning is (re)make by readers through the employment of the different affordances of various modes interacting with one another.