The communication environment now, the beginning of the of the 21st century, has changed immensely due to the combination of digital convergence, the speedy development in personal computing and global networking (Naughton n.d.). People are opened to a whole new technological era of message receiving via mediums like computers or the internet all because of the development in multimodality and affordances.
Multimodality has been defined by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1998) to be all texts that are accompanied by other semiotic modes. This means that any text must be written with proper linguistics and visual arrangements and languages must be spoken with the correct gesture, intonation, and speech sound. Therefore, there are more visuals and graphics contexts being used to convey messages and information as compared to the traditional methods. It is because of this that websites like Youtube, Facebook, and new weblogs have emerged more stronger and attracting more viewers.
Affordances, on the other hand, is defined as the possibilities derived from how the multimodal modes are used, for example, the affordance of a print-based text lies in how the words are used in the text(Walsh 2006, p.34). With formation of weblogs and websites, communication of messages and information provides improved affordance as now there are more associations made with visual and texts.
Understanding multimodality and affordances, it is clearer to see the reason behind the many different variations in the combinations of visual and texts. These variations are meant to provide a variety to the readers or viewers as each one of them have different ways of interpreting the messages that are being conveyed (Shriver 1997, p.365). Shriver (1997, p.365) further stresses that it is important for document designers to understand both the individual differences among readers and the shared ways that people experience documents as these individual interpretations will determined whether or not the messages were properly received and to avoid any misunderstanding. Misinterpretation or misunderstanding may result in serious damages to the image of a company and lead to negative word of mouth among the public.
References:
Kress, G & Van Leeuwen, T 1998, 'Front Pages: (The Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout', Approaches to Media Discourse, Blackwell, Oxford
Naughton, J n.d., Blogging and Emerging Media Ecosystem, Reuters Institute, viewed 6 May 2011,
Schriver, K 1997, 'The Interplay of Words and Pictures', Dynamics in Document Design : Creating Texts for Readers, Wiley Computer Publisher, New York
Walsh, M 2006, 'The 'Textual Shift': Examining the Reading Process with Print, Visual, and Multimodal Texts', Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24-37
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