The point I want to get to is where I can stuate the concept of "visual literacy", in the way that it is articlated in Kress and van Leeuwen's book Reading Images, within more general studies of visuality and visual culture. The problem is that there is so much writing, some of it puporting to be serious academic research, that unquestiningly poresents the argument that contemporary culture is awash with images to the extent forms of visual communication have somehow taken over from the word, from language. This is what I call "visual predominance". I would like to suggest that this issue is not as clear cut as it first seems. To begin with, I would like to remin you of something that Roland Barthes wrote back in 1964 in his essay Rhetoric of the Image:
"Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is present in every image [...] which shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image - we still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the information" (Barthes, 1965, p. 38).
This is the first step in the argument, that of questioning assumptions about visual predominance. I would argue that writing, and therefore text, whetherrendered in print or on screen still continues to be the privieged mode in contemporary Western society. That, even in the context of some rapid "coomunication shifts", the migration from print to scree or the rise of the internet as a public communications platform the word is dominant.
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