Words and images

I had the pleasure yesterday afternoon to sit in a seminar presented by Gunther Kress. Known for his work not only in the theorisation of English language teaching, but also his study of communication through new media, Kress is an intriguing character. At 70 years old, he is still very sprightly and energetic, and is a prolific writer. He is author of a number of books including the Routledge volume Literacy in the New Media Age. He is also a self-confessed Marxist and his beliefs emerged strongly through several passages in his talk.

Professor Gunther Kress started his presentation by showing his audience some combinations of text and images, and made the point that new literacies are emerging as a result of the merging of modalities of communication. He showed that Japanese characters can express more than Western text, and that as a result, reduced text which is integrated into larger area images features in Japanese text books. He counselled that because children spend a lot of their time playing computer games that are influenced by Japanese culture, perhaps we ought to start paying closer attention to the potential effects of this kind of cultural influence on thinking. The spectre of Prensky's digital natives and immigrants theory emerged at one point, as teachers discussed the implications of media on children's learning. My view is that even though Marc Prensky has retracted some of his assertions (due largely to a distinct lack of evidence to support them) there is still a widespread belief among teachers that digital natives exist, and that they are restricted to younger generations. We discussed this with Professor Kress, whose view seemed to me to be a reworking of the Braverman Thesis on technological deskilling. Harry Braverman (another Marxist theorist) believed that technology was imposed upon the workers by the owners of the means of production so that in effect, a widespread deskilling would occur. Technology made workers redundant and saved the owners capital which they would then invest in more technology.

Kress took a similar stance with new media. He asserted that there is a social defragmentation happening as a result of social networking and online gaming, and that social skills are drastically declining. For me, this is a dangerous assumption. My observations are that younger users of digital media tend to communicate just as well through them as they would in face to face environments - they just adapt their social skills across different media and in effect, they become adept at communicating in multiple contexts. Kress also argued that the instant nature of social media (by this I assume he meant the synchronous nature of some tools) precludes young people from reflecting on what is learnt. Again, I contend that this is not necessarily the case, as they find new ways of reflecting through time away from the keyboard/handset, and not all social media are synchronous in nature.

Kress does have a point though when he claims that education institutions tend to adapt their processes to technology, and that this is a key reason why many schools lag behind. Social pace, he argued, does not proceed at the pace of technology, so there is always a gap within which people become marginalised and disenfranchised. His assertion that younger students desire real-time, mobile and multi-tasking activities instead of 'fine grained focus and accuracy' may also be wrong, but I believe he is correct in claiming that younger people engage more in processes (the how to) than in content (the what). This has echoes of connectivism theory, where who you know and the connections you make are more important than learning 'content'.

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