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.