the context of the screen the function of ‘non-linguistic’ modes is not merely to
illustrate or support what is realised in speech and writing, rather these modes ‘fill-
up’ concepts that are realised linguistically in quite different ways. Indeed as I have
shown, each of the modes displayed on a screen may attend to quite different aspects
of what is being communicated linguistically. Increasingly, I want to suggest that
writing on screen functions as a modal sign of or a reference to, the values of
specialist knowledge, authority and authenticity associated with the printed era, the
‘literary text’ and the educated elite.
Language is de-centred by the emphasis of the majority of computer applications on
the visual potential of writing (font, resources for indicating emphasis, materiality,
colour, layout, and so on) in ways that change the practice of writing and reading. (It
is important to note, however, that the visual character of writing has always been
present to calligraphers, typographers and others.) The visual semiotic resources of
writing are used on screen (and elsewhere) to indicate and to classify the specific
domains of knowledge on screen. They are used to visually distinguish between fact
and fiction or the everyday and the scientific or that which is intended for a young or
old audience. As words ‘fly in’, revolve and dissolve on the screen the boundary
between writing and image appears increasingly blurred, indeed at times the
boundary between word and image appears entirely permeable and unstable (Chaplin,
1994; Elkins, 1999). In this way, new technologies offer the potential to ‘recast
modes’, to heighten the blurred boundaries between the visual and the written. At
times writing on the screen becomes fully visual. When a block of type moves about
the screen, interacting in rhythm with other modes, for instance, the tiny scrawl of
printed words retreats to a textured pattern of lines and it is redefined as a visual
representation on screen and the ‘meaning’ of what is written is transformed.
The de-centring of writing on the computer screen is connected, I want to argue, with
the spatial resource of the screen. In computer mediated learning the spatial resource
of the page is superseded by the spatial resource of the screen, and in this move the
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