Kress argues that multimodality is “the normal state of human communication” (1). “At all times communication is a response to a ‘prompt’…Communications has happened when a participant’s attention has focused on some aspect of the communication; she or he has taken that to be a message and has framed aspects of that message as a prompt for her or himself. That prompt has been interpreted [which involves “selection of elements from the message” (42)], becoming a new inward sign, and it in turn leading, potentially, to further communicational action” (32). “An interpretation is a response to a prior prompt…An interpretation is therefore always a mix of features of the ‘ground’, as the prompt framed by the interpreter, with the resources brought by the interpreter” (36). “[W]ithout interpretation there is no communication” (36).
“Mode is a socially shaped and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning…Different modes offer different potentials for making meaning. These differing potentials have a fundamental effect on the choice(s) of mode in specific instances of communication” (79). “[M]odes are the product jointly of the potentials inherent in the material and of a culture’s selection from the bundle of aspects of these potentials and the shaping over time by (members of) a society of the features selected” (80-1). “Societies have modal preferences: this mode is used for these purposes, that other modes for those other purposes” (83).
Examples of modes: image, music, gesture, writing, color, facial expressions, number, 3D objects, layout
Design and Rhetoric
Design “offers a paradigm which keeps the insights offered by critique and turns them into means for action in the designer’s interest, an interest focused on the future. In that context, design is an assertion of the individual’s interest in participating appropriately in the social and communicational world; and an insistence on their capacity to shape their interests through the design of messages with the resources available to them in specific situations” (23). “Design is the process whereby the meanings of a designer…become messages. Designs are based on (rhetorical) analyses, on aims and purposes of a rhetor, and they are then implemented through the instantiations of choices of many kinds. Design rests on the possibility of choice” (28).
Rhetoric is “the politics of communication” (45).
“The rhetor has a political purpose: to bring about an alignment between her or his message, with its ideological position and the position of the audience with their ideological position. The designer has a semiotic purpose: to shape the message, use the available representational resources, for the best possible alignment between the purposes of the rhetor and the semiotic resources of the audience...The rhetor assesses the social environment for communication as a whole. She or he needs to shape their message such that the audience will engage with it…The designer assess what semiotic - representational - resources are available, with a full understanding of the rhetoric’s needs and aims, in such a way that the rhetoric’s interests, needs and requirements, are met and make the best possible match with the interests of the audience” (49-50).
Other Concepts
- Like Fleckenstein et. al, Kress argues that metaphors “provide…guides and framings for thinking” (30).
- The “differences between societies and cultures means difference in representation and meaning” (8)
- Consumption is “increasingly…one of production and participation for those how had previously been seen as audience” (22).
- “Engaging in critique is to refuse to acquiesce in and adapt to existing distributions of roles, rights, responsibilities and power in specific occasions of communications; and to attempt instead to bring these into crisis via a ‘distancing analysis’ of the divergent and often conflicting purposes, aims, means and interests of the makers of the assumed recipients of the messages” (22)
- Material matters. For instance, “shape effects how [a technology] is handled” (187)
Key Terms
- Social semiotics: “a theory that deals with meaning in all its appearances, in all social occasions and in all cultural sites” (2). “Social semiotics is able to say something about the function of each of the modes in this multimodal text; about the relation of these modes to each other; and about the main entities in this text” (59).
- Resources: “constantly remade…in line with what I need, in response to some demand, some ‘prompt’ now - whether in conversation, in writing, in silent engagement with some framed aspect of the world, or in inner debate” (8)
- Semiotic resources: “socially made and therefore carry the discernible regularities of social occasions, events and hence certain stability” (8)
- Knowledge: “a tool for solving problems” (25)
- Information: “the material from which individuals fashion the knowledge they need” (26)
- Learning: “the result of the transformative engagement with an aspect of the world which is the focus of attention by an individual, in the basis of principles brought by her or him to that engagement; leading to a transformation of the individual’s semiotic/conceptual resources” (182)