July 31st, 2010
“Each mode forces me into making certain kinds of commitments about meaning, intended or not. The choice of mode has profound effects on meaning…” (111).
Kress, Gunther. “Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media.” Information Design Journal & Document Design 12 2 (2004): 110-19.
In this 2004 article, continues his discussion of multimodality and representation (addressed in my last post). He presents his discussion from he perspective of semiotics and specifically from that of multimodality, “which deals with all he means we have for making meaning–the modes of representation–and considers their specific way of configuring the world” (110). Read the rest of this entry »
July 30th, 2010
Bearne, Eve. “Interview with Gunther Kress.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26 3 (2005): 287-99.
In this 2005 interview, Eve Bearne from the University of Cambridge, UK discusses multimodality and new media with Gunther Kress, a Professor at University of London and expert on the topic. She grounds this discussion in Kress’s statement that language-based practices, influenced by developments in digital technology are creating some new social relations and are giving way to a “new communications landscape” that is inherently multimodal. Furthermore, these changes reshape social practices and views relating to literacy.
What is Literacy? Read the rest of this entry »
July 29th, 2010
Harrison, Claire. “Visual Social Semiotics: Understanding How Still Images Make Meaning.” Technical Communication 50 1 (2003): 46.
This article, while focusing on still images and the way they make meaning, is a discussion of visual social semiotics and therefore has many applications to video, as well. Also, the concept of social semiotics relates to my research in regard to the discussion of the way we use gestures, which constitute visual communication, to form meaning.
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July 18th, 2010
Berger, Peter L., Thomas Luckmann, and Texas Tech University. Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1967.
Socialization: [T]he comprehensive and consistent induction of an individual into the objective world of a society or a sector of it” (130).
Having discussed in the last post the three moments of externalization, objectivation, and internalization, I am now focusing the discussion into a post specifically on the topic of internalization, which is the “moment” most relevant to my study. Read the rest of this entry »
July 13th, 2010
Berger, Peter L., Thomas Luckmann, and Texas Tech University. Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1967.
“Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product” (61).
Berger and Luckman argue that one must understand both the objective and subjective aspects of reality. To do so, one should view society in terms of an “ongoing dialectical process composed of the three moments of externalization, objectivation, and internalization” (129).
The authors present the idea that there is an institutional world. “Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution” (54). Therefore, the institution is formed by the society. For example, Read the rest of this entry »