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.