Paul Cezanne, Saint Victoire, oil on canvas, 69.9 x 89.5 cm.

This image is being used as the first task for the Visual Communications course. After looking at a few paintings and discussing various compositional elements integral to the painting: larger spatial structures, the organisation of distinctive plains and surfaces, the division of the canvas into distinctive zones and the clustering of details, as well as describing where colour abd tome have an impact on the overall composition., students are asked to write about this image. Cezanne had gradually built up his own unique way of responding to and recording the visual world. And whilst there are some conventional ways of organising his compositions that reference neo-classical ways proportions, there are some highly innovative ways that Cezanne has organised the picture plain in a way that, on the one hand, exhibits some kind of 'truth' to the subject - landscape, hillside, houses and trees, horizon etc - as well as creating features that focus purely the sensation of the image - its atmosphere. This is what is so striking about images like this. To gain an understanding of some of the compostional qualities of the above try these tasks.

The task is to simply write down what you see in relation to the following visual attribute:

• colour
• line
• shape

The second part of the task is to draw lines across the image that indicate the main compositional elements.

T

My rear carrier will never fall off!

An M5 bolt and a simple tap washer installed at the bottom of the seat stay to secure the carrier to the bike frame, now means that my panniers will never fall off the bike - they have done this on occasion.

In addition, the rear block will never again have its life threatened by falling nuts!

Some breakthroughs are so simple.

Questions of Visual Predominance

Has our world become a more visual place? On the basis of the evidence provided on the following pages it would seem to be the case. Having said this, an important argument is developed in this section that will begin to challenge the transparency of this position. The rhetoric of visual predominance is evident in much of the writing on visual communication – art history and graphic design in particular – it is also evident in the work of of Kress and van Leeuwen where there is a prima facie case established that, I argue, too readily accepts the predominance of the visual in contemporary communication.

First, I want to present some examples of where assumptions are made about visual predominance and public engagement in culture at large exemplified by writers such as Gombrich (1972), Berger (1972), and Swann (1991), whereby, that through mass consumption and the saturation of visual messages in the media, advertising, the press etc that the our experience of the world has inevitable become more visual as a consequence of the situation of images. These arguments about the visual amount to hyperbole that tends to exaggerate the extent to which the contemporary communications environment in the West has become dominated and indeed that the world has become saturated by images. In these arguments is generally accepted that due to the development of such institutions as the press, advertising and the mass media generally, contemporary communication in both the urban and domestic environment has become saturated with visual messages. Even the renowned art historian and visual theorist, Ernst Gombrich, was not able to resist the temptation to make sweeping statements about the dominance of visual messages in a paper entitled The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication that first appeared in a special issue of Scientific American in 1972 (reprinted in Gombrich: 1982). He treats the fundamentally visual nature of modern communications and experience as a given, as something already and always in existence:

Ours is a visual age. We are bombarded with pictures from morning to night. Opening our newspaper at breakfast time, we see photographs of men and women in the news, and raising our eyes from the paper, we encounter the picture on the cereal package. The mail arrives and one envelope after another discloses glossy folders with pictures of alluring landscapes and sunbathing girls to entice us to take a holiday cruise, or of elegant menswear to tempt us to have a suit made to measure (137).

Gombrich’s assumptions here about visual predominance are based on evidence from everyday life, in this case a scenario of a typical morning breakfast reading the news etc. But what lies behind this narrative is an assumption about the growing role played by images within the general experience of the population. This then becomes a matter of predominance, the image gaining ground over other modes, especially language, leading him to add a further assumption about how we seem to be entering a new cultural situation, whereby, “it has been asserted that we are entering a historical epoch in which the image will take over from the written word.” (137).

In the same year John Berger’s made similar assertions about the role of the visual in what was at the time a groundbreaking study Ways of Seeing (1972) which also reinforced this growing trend that assumed a new central role for the visual in the modern world, stating that: “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages” (1972: 129). Here Berger was thinking mainly of advertising and other forms of mass media, but these are often represented as the main culprits in the explosion of visual signs and messages in modern culture. In fact, Berger himself used the communicative potential of the key technologies of the time – the richly illustrated printed pages of a book in combination with video– as complementary media to support his argument.

Writing initially from the point of view of language and its relations to graphic design, Carl Swann (1991) adds a rather dramatic twist to this sense of increasing visuality in contemporary western culture by representing the context of typography in urban spaces as “a cacophony of signs form a large part of the visual environment,” stating also that we are “bombarded” with these visually driven messages (1991: 35).  In this loaded language, Swann is indicating the extent to which the senses have become dominated by visual messages in the contemporary world. It is interesting to add that his hyperbole is backed up with statistical evidence on the amount of actual physical space devoted to advertising hoardings in many major world cities (1991: 35). In both works there is a prima facie assumption in the discourse about communication in the modern world that things are becoming ever more driven by visual message, to the point of saturation.

Statements from these different disciplinary perspectives -art history and graphic design - indicate the issues relating to the academic analysis of visual communication and the dominance of the visual in the study of communication. There is, in the arguments presented above and in what follows a tacit assumption that the world, at least in contemporary Western society, that primarily through the rise of technologies and mass communications has indeed become a more visual place. More recently, however, James Elkins 2008) in the preface to his book Visual Literacy, begins, “[a] tremendous force of rhetoric has been brought to bear on the notion that ours is a predominantly visual culture” (2008: vii). The previous authors, with their transparent acceptance of the dominance of the visual, or what I will continue to label as a tendency towards “visual predominance” have made their own contributions to this “force of rhetoric” here alluded in the preface to beginning of Elkins’. In addition, the work of Elkins and others suggests a more critical inclination towards less of a transparent acceptance of visual predominance in reaction to a similar orientation to the visual, therefore, has taken place in the analysis and interpretation of a wide variety of cultural artefacts. So, the second level I want to isolate, is where debates around “visuality” and Visual Culture, both as still relatively new concepts and areas of study in the Human Sciences, where it has become important to deal with images and the visual from a theoretical standpoint in what Mitchell (1991) has termed “the pictorial turn”. That is, a specific shift in recent years in theoretical discourse towards emphasizing the visual in a wide range of cultural text, the apparent move towards treating “visuality” as singular object of study (Mitchell, 1994: 11-34). In fact, rather than suggesting this pictorial turn is itself a form of visual predominance, Mitchell argues against the, so-called, “fallacy of a pictorial turn” (2002: 173), stating that, "the modern era is not unique or unprecedented in its obsession with vision and visual representation." (ibid.), and "to acknowledge the perception of a turn to the visual or to the image as a commonplace, a thing that is said casually and unreflecting about our time" (173). This is the point, that whilst we may accept that there is this greater role for images in contemporary, it is, however, questionable as to how unique this phenomenon is and more important that we are careful about this tendency towards visual predominance to assume uncritically the notion that our experience of contemporary life is more visual.

Mitchell also suggests that there are many instances in the past where a shift in the technology has brought about a consequent shift in the potential of visual perception:

The invention of photography, of oil painting, of artificial perspective, of sculptural casting, of the internet, of writing, of mimesis itself are conspicuous occasions when a new way of making visual images seemed to mark a historical turning point for better or worse (ibid.).

It is interesting to note here that the internet, as a most recent transformation in the production and distribution of images, sits alongside such inventions as say, photography, indicating in their own way the transformative potential of technology in these processes. Though, similar to visual predominance, there are risks in being to deterministic in relation to the role of technology in these, so called, “communication shifts”. In the list of technologies provided in the above quote by Mitchell, there is what seems to be an important omission, the invention of printing. This point will be taken up later as so often current media transformations have been compared to those of the invention of printing. What is important at this point is that the role of images and related technologies there is always the potential to too deterministic. Granted, technology is most certainly an agent of change, but to assume that current shifts in modes of communication are sole responsible would seem to miss the point. By questioning these assumption it is possible to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between technological transformations an various forms of communication including the visual.

In terms of theory, however, there are some important questions to be asked about the transparency and apparent obviousness of this phenomenon in mass culture and the communications environment that we find ourselves in in the modern era that is represented here. As Mitchell advocates in his essay “Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture” (2002), the first thing to do in so-called Visual Studies is to make “vision itself visible”. This is a paradox because it is impossible for us to actually see vision but in his view the object of study in relation to visuality is that of unconcealing or revealing the act of vision itself, that is, vision as a distinctly social and mediated phenomenon. That the work to be done here in relation to contemporary forma of visuality is to see what actually lies behind the apparent obviousness of phenomena like that of visual predominance. In the same article, Mitchell lists ten, so called “myths of visual culture” and one of these being that “we live in a predominantly visual age” (Mitchell, 2002:169 – 70).

In relation to a later argument developed in a critique of the concept of “visual media” he begins by arguing that:

On closer inspection, all the so-called visual media turn out to involve other senses (especially touch and hearing). All the media are, from the standpoint of sensory modality, 'mixed media'. The obviousness of this raises two questions: (1) why do we persist in talking about some media as if they were exclusively visual? Is this just shorthand for talking about visual predominance? And if so, what does 'predominance mean’? Is it a quantitative issue (more visual information than aural or tactile) or a question of qualitative perception, the sense of things reported by the beholder,   audience, viewer/listener? (2) Why does it matter what we call 'visual media'? Why should we care about straightening out the confusion? (Mitchell, 2005:257-8)

Here, Mitchell is indicating some of the pitfalls attached to the problem of visual predominance, in particular, that there is a danger of excluding the important role played by other modalities. I have tried in the previous sections to expand on this notion of visual predominance both in terms of what it stands for, as a way of prioritizing the role of the visual, and more important, how this notion is adopted uncritically within some of the theoretical literature on visual communication. This would actually seem to reinforce the multimodal approach advocated by Kress.

“Visuality”, therefore, indicates a shift on a cultural level in assumptions made about the role of the visual in public communication as well as in theoretical discourse. It suggests a move towards a more prominent role played by images in communication and in theoretical approaches to this and provides an alternative view of culture which has lately challenged the seemingly once dominant paradigm of textuality. Moreover, in recent theoretical writing on communication there has been a tendency, exemplified by Kress and van Leeuwen, towards the notion of multimodal communication, whereby a variety of systems or modes of representation are employed in order to construct meaning within texts and within many forms of text.

In relation to theories of visual literacy, the term visuality is used to distinguish sight or vision as a “social fact” (Foster, 1988: ix) from vision as a physical phenomenon, as in the stimulation of the human sensory system. Visuality locates images (as visually constructed messages) and their interpretation completely within the realm of the social and in theories of Visual Literacy the visual is always identified as being situated in some way within social processes and institutions such as education, the mass media (including the press) and so forth. Thus, the dominance of the visual as a means of communication is implicit in Visual Literacy, which is located within the theoretical discourse on visuality and linked to the institutionalisation of the image and vision, for example in the production of news discourse mediated by the institutions of the press and mass media, or in illustrated textbooks as part of the discourse of education. Both of these instances form major concerns for Kress and van Leeuwen. As a “social fact”, then, Visual Literacy is bound up within practices and processes that both prescribe and mediate the meanings that are realised through the visual. Associated with the phenomenon of visuality it is accepted that, largely as a consequence of the rapid development of communications technologies, most modern cultures have shifted towards more visually oriented ways of communicating, and that according to Kress and van Leeuwen

[REF.]

I argue, that Kress and van Leeuwen in their book Reading Images (1996) whilst advocating a multimodal approach – accepting the a multiplicity of modes behind any communicative act – have, in fact, fallen into exactly the same trap as the authors presented earlier in this section. That is, that they have overemphasized the role of the visual and have done so by assuming visual predominance uncritically.

The point about multimodality is that by making reference to the multiplicity of senses involved in perception, sign making and so on, is that it avoids visual predominance and accepts the necessary fact that all communication engages with many modes. That said, Kress and van Leeuwen, in their, so called "new visual literacy (1996: 23-34) have a tendency to fall right back into justifying their approach in Reading Images by making reference solely to the visual as a singular mode, marked out for special attention as a central feature in their "semiotic landscape".
Granted, the examples that they give, from illustrated children's book, instructional texts, newspaper design aand forms of electronic media, all are used to indicate the ascendancy of the visual in contemporary media. However, this position is still flawed in its tendency to be uncritical of the transparency and given-ness, or already always association towards the visual. The assumption about the visual goes unquestioned in their account. Unlike the perspective taken by Mitchell (1994, 2002 and 2005) whose historical perspective takes on a rather different approach and one that clearly acknowledges the phenomenon of visuality but does so from a skeptical and critical stance and by doing so avoids the pitfalls of visual predominance.

There are a couple of problems here that need to be addressed; both constitute questions concerning visual predominance as well as a more general critique of Visual Literacy. If we reject visual predominance, what do we put in its place? What role is played by technology in the shift towards new, different and potentially multiple modes of communication in what Kress and van Leeuwen call the “semiotic landscape” (1996: 16-20)? Visual Literacy and subsequent debates about this in relation to mass communication can be seen as part of a trend in theory, articulated by Mitchell as the "pictorial turn", towards emphasising the visual over and above other modalities. If the aim of this chapter is to situate the work of Kress and van Leeuwen within more general studies of Visuality, it is evident that their work also can be seen in the context of this turn towards the visual. In the next section I want to continue this line of questioning and provide something of a critique of what the approach taken by Kress and van Leeuwen in Reading Images and what they call the “new visual literacy” (1996: 21), not from the point of view of visual predominance, but by comparing it with other forms of Visual Literacy current in theoretical literature in Visual Studies and Visual Culture.

What is a multimodal text?

In some respects this is a rhetorical question because, as we shall find out, in the approach taken here, all communication is realised through texts and all texts are multimodal. To begin, given that one of the key aims of this thesis is to contribute to debates on the nature of multimodality in relation to media texts it is, at this point, necessary to clarify exactly what is meant by such terms as “multimodal” as well as its application to a range of so called “media texts” (Graddol and Boyd-Barrett, 1994; Burn and Parker, 2003). Although, both these terms and the accompanying property “multimodality” are discussed in detail and applied to some specific cases in the following chapter. A definition of multimodal texts and its application to forms of media text will be provided here, first, by way of making distinctions between the use of “text”, in general usage, and the way that “media texts” as a category relates to specific types of text and, one that has been adopted within the theoretical literature on communication and mass media to account for a wide range of “communicative artefacts” (Graddol, 1993, p. 41). Suffice it to say that multimodal media texts are specific forms of media text. Text, it shall be seen, will be defined beyond its most common usage, that of carrier or container for language , or in its material form. Text, in communications research has a much more nuanced meaning and relates to communication as a process and that way that communication events are realised:

Communication - whatever the mode - always happens as text. The 'stuff' of our communication needs to be fixed [...] in a mode: knowledge or information has no outward existence other than in such modal fixing. The fixing provides the material resource through which or in which it is to be materialised (Kress 2003, p. 47).

Text, in this context, is the vehicle or the physical and material substance through which communication happens and the important thing here is that communication, in the sense that Kress articulates it, would not happen without it.

This approach to texts has been developed from the work of Michael Halliday (1978) and his work on language as a “social semiotic” and the study of multimodal communication stems from this very specific brand of semiotics and in relation to the notion of "language as a social fact" (1978, p. 1). Since then, these ideas have been developed to account for a range of different modes and media. Hence, the fact that we now speak in terms of multimodal communication, texts, multimodality etc.

On the other hand, the term “visuality” stems from the notion of “vision as a social fact” (Foster, 1988, p. ix) will be used later in this chapter to indicate both the general shift in modes of communication; it is presented here by way of a specific critique of the way that visual literacy has been adopted to account for some of the consequences of these shifts. Visuality is also, perhaps more importantly, adopted within theoretical studies of the visual aspects of communication. But whilst it is used in the current chapter to assist in a critique of Visual Literacy, it is multimodality that is preferred throughout the thesis as a whole. The argument being developed in this chapter will justify this approach.

Multimodal communication refers to the fact that all communication by its very nature in multimodal in the sense that there is never only just one mode or system of representation at play in any communication. In conversation, for example, there is not just the sound of the spoken utterances that form the content of the entire message that is conveyed. Added to this are such things as gesture, intonation, eye contact and so on, which all provide important cues within the conversation. The same is true of forms of media. Something relative simple as a printed document still relies on the integration of material from many different modes, type, layout and composition etc. all of which are distinctive modes.

All media texts are by their very nature multimodal (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1998, p. 186). They all rely on a variety of representational system for their realization. On one level this is quite an obvious thing to say about all communication, or all texts, Kaltenbacher ed. (2004, p. 190) yet this style of research is still relatively new. An important question would be along the lines of why so much research in the past has been ‘monomodal’, so to speak. Why has the study of language as a singular mode been for so long the main object of study? This we shall see will be an important debate in itself in the sections that follow In addition, Ventola et al (2004) provide, in their various papers, an overview of current trends within the growing area of ‘multimodal studies’. In his introduction to an edited collection of articles on approaches to multimodal research he begins with the basic premise that "the analysis of language alone is not enough" (Veltola et al, eds, 2004, p. 1) and that once the object of analysis is moved away from language a wide variety of objects of study become possible. Articles in Ventola’s book develop arguments about a range of artifacts from printed documents to film, video and other forms of electronic media. Striking, if only in virtue of the wide variety of approaches and in the array of possible objects of study, O’Halloran (2004), also provides a series of papers that analyse a wide range of texts types including: architecture, film, exhibition design, print advertisements, to name only a few; all analysed from the point of view of how meanings are realised through the combination of modalities. In the first instance, therefore, one of the most striking things about research of this kind is the wide variety of texts that can be analysed using the multimodal approach. Or, to put it another way, it is telling the breadth and variety of contexts which this notion of a text is able to perform once it becomes associated with the construction of meaning independent of modality, in fact text here is the means through which different modalities can combine to create meaning.

So, the first and most basic premise in a multimodal approach is that meanings are created through the combination of different codes, modes of representation, or meaning making systems, and as such that are brought together and combine to form integrated and coherent messages. A film, for example, brings together different ways of expressing and articulating messages – including, moving image, spoken word, soundtracks, music, voice-over etc. – and these occur across different sensory channels – vision, voice, listening and so forth. In this sense a communicative artefact such as a film is multimodal (Allen and Goodall, 2007, Rheindorf, 2004) and it is so because of the different modes that it employs in order to make meaning. A film is also a form of text in the sense that it has a material form, it is the surface or physical form in which communication, meanings and messages, are made concrete and therefore provide access to the meanings it conveys.

So, multimodality has become an important strand within recent semiotic analysis of media texts. In particular, the work of Kress and van Leeuwen’s work on visual design (1996, 1998), Michael O’Toole (1994) on painting, sculpture and architecture are both major influences on the case studies that follows in the next chapter and beyond. In addition, much of the recent research undertaken by Kress and van Leeuwen constitute attempts to explain, as well as to provide some empirical evidence for the shifts in communication towards the visual through their analysis of the visual design of texts and more generally how meaning is created through the visual channel. They have argued convincingly that “All texts are multimodal” (1996, p. 186). However, it will be seen that, even in spite of the innovative nature of their approach, as stated earlier, it is not without its problems and its contradictions and these are issues that are addressed directly in the section “Critique of Visual Literacy” that follows.

Having said this, their position is a major departure from language as being either the dominant or privileged mode in human communication and is, in the first instance, through their adoption of the concept of multimodality, an acknowledgement of the complexity and variety of human communication, both through interaction, say in conversation, and in the meaning of texts. The key point here being that there will never be just one single system of representation in operation at any one time. Kress and van Leeuwen (1998) continue by stating that:

Language always has to be realized through and comes in the company of other semiotic modes. When we speak, we articulate our message not just in words, but through a complex interplay of speech and sound, of rhythm, of intonation; accompanied by facial expression, gesture and posture. When we write, our message is expressed not only linguistically, but also through the visual arrangement of marks on the page. Any form of text analysis which ignores this will not be able to account for all the meaning expressed in texts (p. 186).

Thus, any communication relies on there being a variety of modalities through which messages are articulated and subsequently realized and this will be the case with all texts.

In terms of a methodology then, focusing on the multimodal properties of media texts, will afford certain lines of enquiry. In the first instance, one of the consequences of taking this kind of approach is that a wide range of media forms and artefacts can be analysed from a similar perspective. In some sense multimodal texts are just media texts seen from this more complex form of semiotics that see all forms of communication as multimodal.

In more general commonsense terms “text” is usually associated with written or printed communication, often to the exclusion of other forms of communication, or indeed, other modalities. Thus, when we talk about the text of an email message, the text of an Act of Parliament or the text of a newspaper story, there is a tacit assumption that the “text” is the material and visible form in which language or narrative is being expressed Gradoll, 1994, p. 41 – 42). More often than not, text is most often associated with the printed form of language, for example, the set text of a course of study ordinarily refers to a book and to the printed copy that it contains.

In multimodal approaches, therefore, the term “text” has a much more specific meaning. To illustrate this, let us take an example of a story in a newspaper. As a text, it can be analysed from the point of view that the messages being communicated are being conveyed through more than just one channel or mode. If the text is formed from the interplay of modalities, of systems of representation, or codes, as suggested earlier, then all of the elements that combine to make up the news story, including the headline, the body copy of the story itself, photographs, as well as any other graphical elements, will all combine to produce a complete, integrated and coherent messages. Even the style of presentation of the news story contributes to the composition and construction of the meanings communicated by the text. For instance, even the size, shape and orientation of the newspaper as a whole will make it distinct from others and define its market and style. The distinction between quality press and tabloids is first and for most articulated through the size and shape of its pages. Moreover, it is argued throughout the thesis, that space, in the form of compositional devices such as page layout and the spatial organisation of all elements within the text, contributes significantly to the way that messages and meaning are constructed and most importantly to the manner in which they are received and interpreted, in short, its framing.

In this context it can easily be argued that even a simple graphical element such as type, one of the most basic features that make up a newspaper story and, however simple it might appear as a graphical element in the design of a newspaper is not confined to a single modality. It is very much a part of the multimodal characteristics of the text. In the first instance, any form of type, as a graphical element, relies on both visual and verbal signs for its interpretation by readers. Type is a way of presenting a verbal message (language) but it does so in visual form (image) and its realization is entirely dependent the visual modality. In addition, type is also a specific form of layout element and embodies distinctively spatial attributes, meaning that it can also be analysed as a specific feature of the visual design of the page. Type occupies space and these spatial characteristics also add to its meaning. In this manner, therefore, type is used as a “semiotic resource” by designers (Kress (Fei, 2004, p. 51 – 56). This is also the case with the use of space which itself can be characterised as another distinctive modality. All typographical elements occupy a certain amount of space on the page and this forms a component within the composition of the page as a whole. The spatial dimension thus functions as a specific modality which is communicated visually and it forms another key aspect in the visual design of multimodal texts.

A question of visual predominance

I think that it is arguable that there is greater predominance of the visual in media texts and what I would like to do at this stage of the argument is to bring into question the the idea that we live in a more visual moment in culture and at least to question the transparency of this assumption. I argue that the essentially, Kress and van Leeuwen cannot have their cake and eat it. That debate about the predominance of the visual misses an important point because, firstly, as Kress and others have argued, all forms of communication are of necessity multimodal and therefore cannot be described straightforwardly as either visual or non-visual, and secondly because, context, as framework of expectation, are fundamental to all communication and that those frameworks, by their very nature, cannot be described as being either visual or non-visual.

I will pick up on this point about framing later.

Such trends can be observed in the visual component of the presentation of news discourse, especially in the contemporary press where the visual nature of the medium has progressively been transformed, with technology being one of the drivers of these changes.One immediate consequence of this greater reliance on the visual in the press is the progressive breaking-up of the complete text into smaller constituent units and the increasing colonisation of the page by images and graphics. This begs the question as to whether this breaking-up of the text is a symptom of more visually oriented "modes of communication" or perhaps of a more visually oriented culture, and indeed forces us to ask the extent to which technology is an "agent of change" in this process.

Towards a new visual literacy?: a challenge to Kress and van Leeuwen

"Visuality" is a distinctive topic within visual studies and, like semiotics, it yields a potential set of research techniques which can be used to describe and analyse media texts, newspapers, for example. The concept of visuality sets up a useful generative opposition or dialectic between, on the one hand, the singularity of vision (sight as a sensory modality) and on the other; the multiplicity of of vision, or points of view, that is, the multimodal nature of forms of visual communication (vision as a semiotic reality).

Visual Literacy bridges both of these oppositions - the singular and the multimodal - and in doing so combines forms of language competence - literacy, with vision.

Associated with the phenomenon of visuality is the generally accepted view that, chiefly as a consequence of the rapid development of technologies for the production of media texts and other technologies that generate and distribute mass images, that most modern cultures have shifted in recent years towards more visually oriented ways of communicating. That, according to Kress and vanLeeuwen (1996), "[t]he last two decades have seen a far-reaching change in media and modes of communication" (p. 21). The point here being that general cultural process such as visual communication and the mass consumption of visually oriented media texts has increased inn the last few decades. Moreover, it is argued that a major part of this shift constitutes a move away from an "old visual literacy" towards a "new visual literacy" (ibid.).

Whilst it is arguable that technology may be entirely responsible for these shifts, much of the literature on visual communication tends to support this view, it is so often seen to be a central driver, an "agent of change", similar in its impact to, say, the printing press in fifteenth century Euroup (cf Eisenstein) in these shifts in modes of communication. Here it is definitely worth speaking inn terms of modality from a more technical perspective, since technology has shifted modes of representation to a point where, in both the research literature and in more general debate about the changing nature of public communication. It is assumed that we do now live in a culture where the image is dominant and in many circumstances in the mass communications context maintains primacy.

An example of how this polemic assiciated with visuality and visual literacy can be exemplified in resent research. In addition, the case of newspaper design is used as an exemlar:

"In newspapers, the pages of the 1960s are black and white, and covered in print: in the 1960s, by contrast, there is colour, there are images; and in many contemporary Western newspapers print has very nearly been pushed off the page" (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996).

There are many other examples of this kind of transparent thinking in the literature. In subsequent writing I wish to challenge this a priori, transparent assumption of the progressive visuality towards a "new visual literacy" that is evident in the work of Kress and van Leeuwen.