A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

convention that size will signify value. In other words, the relationship between
meaning and form is motivated and nonetheless draws on resources shaped by
convention.

The choice of one semiotic resource over another raises the question of what
motivates a sign maker’s choice of semiotic resource. The concept of the ‘interest’ of
the sign maker is developed by Kress (1993) in response to this question:

'Interest' is the articulation and realisation of an individual's relation to
an object or event, acting out of that social complex at a particular
moment, in the context of an interaction with other constitutive factors
of the situation which are considered as relevant by the individual.

(Kress, 1993:174)

The concept ‘interest’ formulates motivation as the relation of the sign maker to the
social context of sign production, which includes the potentials of the modal
resources that the context makes available. In this way social semiotics shifts the
focus from modal system to the process of meaning making (signs). The concept of
interest theorises the relationship between signifier and signified as a trace of the
characteristics of the producer of the sign (as a socially located person) and the entity
to be represented. The sign is a product of the complex interaction of the sign maker’s
'physiological, psychological, emotional, cultural, and social origins' (Kress,
1997:11). It is the sign maker’s ‘interest’ that, according to Kress, leads to the
selection of Criterial aspects of the signified and specifies the characteristics of 'apt
signifiers'.

Kress (1997) argues that the notion of ‘interest’ ‘factors in’ the social environment in
which the sign is made and the social character of the signifier. Nonetheless, I argue
that there is a need to look beyond the social as it is articulated through the individual
sign maker in order to understand the relationship between the social organisation of
people and the production of signs.

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