There is always for me one troubling problem about trying to
directly contrast the affordances of verbal and visual (or other
material) technologies for communication or other semiotically-
relevant purposes. Our terms of analysis, and methods of
analysis, are usually so heavily oriented to the verbal. When
people explain how their multimedia work, or how or what others'
stacks/productions mean, they are likely to be doing so in words,
prompted by questions in words, the results analyzed as verbal
data, in verbal semantic categories (especially implicit ones)
and genres.
I don't think there is a direct escape from this
methodologically. We have no traditions of visual analysis in
visual terms, no visually coded theories, no visual rhetorics of
evidence that function the same way politically or intellectually
that our verbal ones do. Inventing these is rather pointless,
since they have not been around to shape the meaning-making of
our subjects, and will not have the intertextual resonances to
make them richly meaningful for our colleagues. Not unless they
catch on and spread widely and last a century or two. (Possible,
not likely).
Instead, I think a more consistently heterogeneous approach is
more feasible. That we include as much of the other media
_together with_ language (we're not going to get it out of our
heads anyway) as possible in every step and stage of the work:
the prompts, the affordances in the interviews, the expression of
opinions or responses to works, our own analysis, our own
communications about ... etc. We are only just getting to the
point where this is becoming feasible.
The deeper theoretical justification for this is that the various
media all work intimately together functionally all the time
anyway. We never use even language apart from imagery,
kinesthesia, body languages, etc., much less any of these others
apart from language (at least after a very early age). They are
co-evolved historically to work with one another, co-develop in
ontogeny in use, get differentiated more by analysts than by
ordinary users, and generally operate as a unified -- and not at
all well understood -- intersemiotic system. Everything we think
we know about language, or about visual semiotics, is incomplete
and potentially misleading, absent a view of their integration
with one another, etc.
There are many interesting and valuable issues and clues in
Olson's work, but also some places for caution, I think. As
before, my review of his _World on Paper_ is available for the
asking to xcma-ers.
JAY.
---------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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