For a more detailed view of the page above please click here.
Using the Internet exclusively for text is something akin to using a grand piano to play chopsticks, it serves the purpose adequately but can be used for so much more.
In the early days of the Internet the limited bandwidth and processing power of most computers meant that data passed between machines was of limited richness and principally consisted of textual exchanges between users. This has changed rapidly over the past twenty years to the stage where academics such as Gunther Kress can securely claim that the role of text has been overtaken by the use of the image. And that this change has profound social, political and cultural implications. (Kress, 2003)
Kress in his work Literacy in the New Media Age uses a metaphor to illustrate a component of this transformation: the move from ‘telling the world to showing the world’. (Kress, 2003, p140)Which he goes on to expand from a semiotic perspective moving from the narrow sense of reading as ‘getting meaning from a written text’ to ‘making sense of the world around me.’(Kress, 2003, p140)
The church images used in the past to reinforce orthodoxy are the antithesis of the images Kress discusses. Now the consumers/ readers of texts and images are reproducing and controlling the images shifting the balance of power. Texts are delivered via the computer screen but are subordinated to the mode of the image. No longer is the artificial image the exception it is the everyday currency of new media.