Digital Textuality: Using Text, Image, and Sound in New Ways
Digital technology has changed the way we function and provided us the ability to communicate in new ways: textually, visually, and aurally. Most of us, perhaps unconsciously, except that microelectronics, software-based communication system, and other new and merging digital technologies are playing a greater role in organizing our lives. As digitality exerts it’s influence, we witness the remediation of past media forms. Media, by nature mutates, matures, and evolves into other forms of media. For example, books are eBooks, music is captured in audio files and played on iTunes, and television has moved to YouTube. No longer just analog—ink fixed on paper and analogue airwaves transmitted to towers—digital text is more. As we’ve transitioned these media forms, we’ve come to see and use digital text in new ways.
The Transition From Analogue to Digital
As textuality transitioned to the screen, it developed additional iterations. New conventions and genres like e-mail, blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, video and audio mash-ups and remixes, social media sites have emerged. These forms of digital influence former conventions and lead to new forms of digital discourse. As shifting technologies open avenues for user participation, digital textuality provides users the opportunity to develop the new illiteracies for the media they consume, process, and produce.
It is not difficult to see how digital technologies have altered and extended our connection to the media. Digital technology has democratized cultural expression and created participatory culture. Marshall McLuhan’s famous theory postulated that “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace of pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (McLuhan et al. 2003) and “… the ‘medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” (McLuhan et al. 2003) However, in his book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte challenges McLuhan’s well-worn dictum when he says, “The medium is not the message in a digital world. It is an embodiment of it.” (Negroponte 1995)
New Media Forms
Negroponte’s point is perfectly exhibited when we consider the blog. Blogging (originally called weblogging) emerged in the late 1990s and provided readers and users a platform to express their ideas and opinions. Pioneers like Cameron Barrett and Brigitte Eaton began collecting weblogs, collections of links with associated short-form commentary that ranged from personal thoughts to essays on their websites. (Blood September 7, 2000) However, weblogging required specialized computer coding skills, so the community of webloggers was small. Eventually, do-it-yourself weblogging tools developed and the requisite coding skills were no longer required. Blog publishing hit the mainstream as any nontechnical users could quickly and easily publish a blog.
Today, bloggers integrate collage, hypertextuality, and multimodality to extend the boundaries of their text to communicate information in ways that that traditional analogue media cannot. These new media forms can be manipulated, modified, and used; they are transformed from a static medium to an interactive, multimodal features. The metaphorical desktop is designed to create a responsive and intuitive experience. In her book, Material Metaphors, Technotext, and media Specific Analysis, N. Katherine Hayles’s tells her readers:
“To change the material artifact is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with words, which inevitably changes the meaning of the words as well. This transformation of meaning is especially potent when the words reflexively interact with the inscription technologies that produce them.” (Hayles 2002)
Lev Manovich takes this idea one step further in his book, The Language of New Media, when he says, “New media also allows to create version of the same object which differ from each other in more substantial ways.” (Manovich 2001) Therefore, scalability, spatialization, and variability are all important characteristics digital textuality presents in new media forms like blogs.
This is particularly relevant when we consider the audio-visual components that are now commonly incorporated into the blog structure. Whether videos or images are static, moving or interactive, they can increase the persuasive and emotional impact of a blog’s content. The effect heightens interactivity between blogger and reader. Furthermore, images can be used to support information via parataxis. For example, charts or graphs can supplement or supplant text. Consequently, digital textuality can be seen as a complex relationship between verbal and visual meaning.
Digital Textuality and Design
Social semiotics plays an important role in digital textuality because the materiality of the mode affects the meaning. In the “multimodal landscape of communication” mode and design must correctly express the intended message. As new media forms increase their use of image, motion, and sound to convey meaning, it is important that the appropriate affordances be used. Although writing and speech linear format, when presented on the screen image, motion, and sound may not possess the same causality. Therefore, it helps to view screen design as what Gunther Kress calls “a prospective enterprise.”
In his Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation, “Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media,” Gunther Kress outlines the questions we should consider as move textual messages to the screen:
“The questions it asks is: ‘what, in this environment, with this kind of audience, with these resources that are available for implementing my design, given these social, economic, ‘political’ constraints, and with my interests now at this moment, is the best way of shaping that which I wish to make, whether as ‘ message’ or as any object (of design)?” Kress
The Challenge of Digital Textuality
Matthew Kirschenbaum reminds us “Historically, the technologies for reproducing words and images have evolved along separate lines of development.” (Hocks et al. 2003) Now digital technology is merging these lines. What we see is that to successfully remediate any textual object, one must be digitally savvy and digitally literate so as to understand how the medium affects its relationship with the original message:
“The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us. Since understanding stops action, as Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this conflict by understanding the media that extend us and raise these areas within and without us.” (McLuhan et al. 2003)
As technology evolves we evolve. We create and embrace new modes of communication and that strengthen our position in a networked society. We participate in the remediation of the analogue and proliferate the digital through our networked communities. Like media, we are mutating, maturing, and evolving. And, we’re exerting creativity to create new forms of digital textuality.
Works Cited
Blood, Rebecca. Rebecca’s Pocket. Rebecca’s Pocket , “Weblogs: A History and Perspective.” Last modified September 7, 2000. Accessed December 10, 2011.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed December 10, 2011).
Hocks, Mary, and Michelle Kendrik. Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
Kress, Gunther. Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation, “Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media .” Accessed December 10, 2011. http://www.knowledgepresentation.org/BuildingTheFuture/Kress2/Kress2.html.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Terrance Gordon. Understanding media : the extensions of man. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.
