Kress Chs. 1-2
...words are, relatively speaking, empty of meaning, or perhaps better, the word as sound-shape or as letter-shape gives no indication of its meaning, it is there to be filled with meaning...
However... the image itself and its elements are filled with meaning. There is no vagueness, no emptiness here. That which is meant to be represented is represented. Images are plain full with meaning, whereas words wait to be filled (Kress 3-4).
[Apologies, limited readership, as I approach this post as something more akin to freewriting.]
I am fascinated by this presentation of differences between alphabetic text and visual text and perhaps mostly so because in addition to this Multimodal Media Literacy course, I am also currently enrolled in a course titled Philosophers as Writers. We're asking many questions, more than we have answers for, but they center around the ambiguities of language. Does it matter how something is said? Or will the essence/truth of the message come through regardless of form? Is there objective meaning language (and I use the term broadly here, to include new media as well) can represent? Or is language arbitrary?
At first blush, Kress sounds like a deconstructionist, though upon further reflection I don't believe that is really his intent (or even if he is, it's inclusion in this discussion is, upon further review, rather irrelevant). By contrasting the visual media with the alphabetic and claiming the visual definitively less ambiguous and more precise, he seems to be talking less about the meaning behind the "text" as much as the form of the "text."
Ay, but here's the rub: cannot both be ambiguous as representations of meaning? I'm thinking of facial expressions, as in the perennial debate over the meaning behind Mona Lisa's smile. Is there not a multiplicity of interpretations? Do not images carry connotations culturally and contextually that can render them universally ambiguous? Is there such thing as a neutral "text" (visual or alphabetic)?
I don't know where these questions lead, nor do I really have a grasp on what the implications are for me as a teacher of multimodal media literacy. I also grant that I may be misreading and misapplying Kress' words here. Nevertheless, I suppose at the very least, the freewriting and questions here reinforce the need to understand genre conventions and how they influence understanding-- both in alphabetic and visual texts.
When I think of ambiguity that frustrates visually, I'm reminded of the last moments of Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). If you haven't seen it, do me a favor and don't watch this (though I suppose the aforementioned ambiguity of it may render you none the wiser).