Month: February 2024

Gunther Kress’s discussion on modes and multimodality is important to keep in mind in the digital age. Being conscious about how you use modes and approach multimodality is extremely beneficial in the digital age, when we have so many more modes available than before. As Kress points out when discussing multimodality, different modes can do different things, and bringing them together can provide more information that conveys meanings in the form of different medium. Because of the digital age, modes have been able to be combined to create new media like websites, films, and video games. Digital media has expanded the uses of modes, so being more conscious about them is crucial to be able to effectively use them to create such media. This is especially highlighted in the MODE video guide about digital film and moving images.

As discussed by the MODE team, film is very much a multimodal form. Framing, the camera angle, the lighting, the sound, all are modes working simultaneously within a film. Each mode of needs to be planned, most of the time with a whole team working together on each one, then combined together in a cohesive way. All the modes add something to the medium, so if one if haphazardly worked on then the whole film can fall apart. Filmmakers have to be conscious about each mode and how they work together in order to effectively communicate the message of their piece.

We need to learn and be aware of multimodality, how all these modes work and can be put together to convey meanings.

The excerpts from “Papyrus to Hypertext” and “Phaedrus” texts bring up very interesting, and polarizing views to the emergence of writing and its relationship to thought. While Christian Vandendorpe thought that writing was a “great intellectual revolution” (Vandendorpe, 8) Socrates saw it as less valuable, questioning “who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection” (Plato). It is interesting because both turned to thought as their reasoning for why it is amazing, and why it is frivolous.

Vandendorpe viewed thought as wild and unstable, our perception is constantly changing, and new associations are being made. In his eyes, text provided a way to record and reorganize aspects of our thoughts. We had the means to record what we were thinking and refine or rework them in new ways.

However, Plato’s “Phaedrus” describes writing very differently. In the text, writing is compared to painting. Socrates discusses with Phaedrus how, like a painting, text can provide someone with a view of life but is unable to answer questions you have on what is being viewed. Unlike the spoken word, you cannot explore what a text is presenting, unable to ask what it means.

It is interesting to view both sides because while they speak from different sides of writing, they both present important points on the subject. Plato was a student of Socrates, taught to view the world from a philosophical point of view. Thought to them was everything, and writing was seen as a cage. Both Plato and Socrates saw writing as too fixed, stopping philosophical thought by placing it on a surface, stuck in time and unable to change or question. Vandendorpe, however, was a writer. He was living during the emergence of hypertext, a new media given rise by the internet. Hypertext gave a new way to explore writing, branching out to new paths and exploring fragmented ideas that could be connected by links. Writing, to him, was able to take the rapidly changing thoughts of our minds, and allow us to organize and transform them.

Both perspectives bring up interesting aspects of writing. Plato points out the fixation of writing, how once it is all you have to go by and cannot question or explore the text further than what is given. While fixed, however, Vandendorpe brings to light how writing provides a way to capture a thought and refine it, instead of losing it in the ever-changing flow of the mind. It is important to keep in mind the advantages and disadvantages of a medium, how it may work in one aspect but fail in another, allowing you the choice of if, or how to utilize it.