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In defence of writing: a social semioticperspective on digital media, literacy andlearningHavard Skaar

Abstract

From a learning perspective, social semiotics research-ers tend to focus on the liberation latent in themultimedia options available through the new media.It is true that digital media democratise the possibilitiesopen to the general public of a more varied andcomprehensive text production than ever before, bothin and outside school. Participating in this textproduction naturally implies a richer potential forlearning. But digital technology also allows us to optout of, and thus avoid, semiotic work. With this as thestarting point, the present article sets out to highlightthe pedagogical benefits associated with the writtenmode, precisely in an age when the digital media aremaking multimodal forms of expression increasinglyavailable to us all.

Key words: social semiotics, digital media, writing,literacy, learning

Introduction

Social semiotics provides a theoretical basis for relatingthe use of signs both to learning and to the use of digitaltechnology. In this article, these two aspects are seen asinterconnected: firstly, that learning takes placethrough the semiotic work we perform when we createsigns and texts; and secondly, that digital technologyhas established new premises for what we can learnthrough this meaning-creating process. The firstpremise is that text and sign production implieslearning. The second is that digital technology changesthe basic conditions for text production and thus alsofor what we learn from it. How?

After discussing the first two premises in greater detail,I shall return to this question, which can be put moreexplicitly as follows: if computers and digital mediahelp us to produce text, what exactly is it they help uswith? What does this help mean for what we learn?

First premise: we learn from semiotic work

The first premise is to define learning as semiotic work.In this work, which consists in giving what we wish to

express a form that allows it to be communicated toothers, we learn through the resistance we experiencein our encounter with the semiotic resources we utilise.Defined in this way, however, learning cannot bedistinguished from communicating or expressingsomething in general. Social semiotics accordinglygives us a theoretical basis for conceptualising what itmeans to learn something, but at the same timelearning is usually understood in the context of aninstitutional framework. The school’s teaching curri-culum, for example, sets out guidelines for what pupilsare expected to learn through their work with differentsubjects. This means that what is to be representedthrough the pupils’ semiotic work, and thus learned, isa question to be decided through social and politicalprocesses, which a (social) semiotic learning theorycannot explain. But in the lower grades of theNorwegian school system, from where the empiricalexamples in this article are taken, learning to producetext, for example a story, is a goal in its own right. It isalso a goal that the pupils should produce stories withthe help of digital technology. Text production, withand without the use of digital technology, is in otherwords a learning objective in itself. That makes theassociation between semiotic work and learningclearer in my empirical examples than in cases wherethe knowledge requirements in the school curricula aredefined as something other than, and in many caseswholly independent of, skills linked to text production.

Second premise: digital media change oursemiotic work

The second premise, that digital technology and newmedia change the premises for what we learn throughtext production, is often associated with the concepts ofmultimodality and literacy.

The multimodal perspective arises from the focus onthe social and material basis for the production of signsthat Michael Halliday presents in ‘Language as a socialSemiotic’ (1978). Halliday focuses on the material andsocial premises for the use of spoken language.Multimodal social semiotics is a perspective that alsoseeks to incorporate the underlying principles for theuse of other signs than speech, for example dance,

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facial expression and gestures, or drawing, paintingand sculpture. While O’Toole (1994) retains a linguisticmodel to explain the use of semiotic resources otherthan the spoken word, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996,2001) are interested in arriving at common semioticprinciples for the creation of meaning in differentexpressive forms or modes. They aim in this way tocreate a multimodal framework for semiotic analysis.Social semiotics becomes multimodal social semiotics.In this context literacy, defined as our ability to read andwrite, is analysed as part of a multimodal design wheremeaning is created through the interplay betweendifferent modes. Digital media can, for example, makeit easier to combine writing and pictures to createmultimodal texts. In the Saussurean tradition, ClaudeLevi-Strauss (1962/1974) called this kind of text-creating work ‘bricolage’(see also Chandler, 2005).Social semiotic theorists like Kress, and researchersfrom other disciplines in ‘‘new literacy studies’’(Pahland Rowsell, 2006; Street, 1998), have chosen to use theterm ‘design’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000).

Digital technology is naturally no prerequisite formultimodal text production. In a certain sense it maybe claimed that all text is multimodal. The design of thewriting and its positioning on the page of a book, forexample, does not get its meaning through the writtenmode alone: the quality of the paper, its colour andtexture also contribute to the creation of meaning forthe reader. Digital technology has however radicallyaltered our opportunities to create multimodal textsourselves.

This may explain why digital technology and newmedia are key elements in the groundwork done in thelast decade to relate social semiotic theory to multi-modality and literacy. In the introduction to one of hisbooks on literacy, Kress typically points to ‘‘a revolu-tion in the landscape of communication’’ in an agecharacterised by ‘‘social, economic, communicationaland technological change’’ (Kress, 2003, p. 9). Incommon with Snyder (1997) he points to a movement‘‘from page to screen’’, and ‘‘from writing to image’’when discussing ‘‘literacy in the new media age’’. Thebasis for his argument is that digital technology andnew media have given both multimodality and writinga new role to play and that this has consequences forour text production and what we can learn from it.

What the sign can tell

Social semiotics stresses the social, not the systematic,premises for the production of signs. According toKress the sign is motivated (1993). With this statementhe places himself in opposition to Ferdinand deSaussure (Saussure et al., 1916/1983) who claimedthat the sign is arbitrary. Saussure believed that thesign is arbitrary because there is a random connectionboth between the content and expression of the signand between the sign and its referent outside the sign

system. According to Saussure the sign gets its mean-ing from what the other signs in the sign system are not.Kress, on the other hand, claims that we create the signanew each time we use it. He believes that each use ofthe sign is therefore based on a double metaphor. Firstwe select some aspect of an object we want to saysomething about (it is impossible to say everything andour interests determine what we want to say about theobject), and then we select a sign that represents whatwe are interested in saying about the object (oursemiotic resources determine our choice). Kress uses a3-year-old boy’s drawing of a car in the form of circleson a sheet of paper as an example of such a doublemetaphor: the boy (on the basis of his interests) allowsthe wheels to represent the car (first metaphor) beforehe (on the basis of his semiotic resources) allows thecircles to represent the wheels (second metaphor)(Kress, 1993, p. 174). Kress presents the relationshipbetween these two metaphors as follows:

‘‘the child decides that wheels are criterial in representingthe signified ‘car’. That decision then determines whatmay be an apt signifier, in this case circles. Wheels areselected as the criterial aspect of the object to be repre-sented (the signified), and circles are apt signifiers in thesense that they adequately signify, represent or expressthe characteristics of the signified. All signs are formed inthis metaphoric process. All signs are metaphors’’(Kress,1993, p. 174).

As we see, Kress pursues Saussure’s bipartition of thesign in his interpretation of the sign user’s choices. Thefirst metaphor arises because the referent is repre-sented through the choice of a signified which not onlysays something about the car but also what it is aboutthe car that interests the boy. The second metaphorarises because the signified becomes a sign through thechoice of a signifier which not only tells us somethingabout the wheels but also about the boy’s choice fromamong the semiotic resources at his disposal. Kressasserts that the signified (the boy’s interest in the car’swheels) ‘‘determines what may be an apt signifier’’(inother words, the circles he draws on the paper).

What determines our choice of sign?

However, I do not believe that the choice of sign takesplace in a causal chain in which the choice of thesignified determines or leads to the choice of signifier.Saussure asserted that in the sign the signified andsignifier were fused together like ‘‘two sides of a sheetof paper’’: it is impossible to make a cut on one sidewithout simultaneously cutting the other. This mu-tuality between signified and signifier holds true evenif we shift focus from langue to parole, which meansthat we relate to the sign in use instead of (as Saussuredid) to the sign in system. The three-year-old boy hadpaper and pencil to hand and chose to draw somecircles, which he then explained by saying: ‘‘this is a

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car’’. He has just about succeeded in making some-thing that looks like circles on the sheet of paper. Canthis have been the simplest solution for him? Or theonly choice he had? We do not know. The actualconnection between the boy’s interests and thepossibilities he had to express them in this concreteexample is undetermined and not really the point hereeither. The point is that the example illustrates that theproduction of a sign is always a result of an interplaybetween what we intend to express and what wesucceed in expressing with the resources at ourdisposal. It is thus not only the signified that affectsour choice of signifier but also the converse. Computertechnology and new media change the possibilitiesopen to the sign-maker to choose a signifier whichexpresses the interest underlying the choice of sig-nified. It is the dynamic between those choices thatresults in the merging of signified and signifier into asign, in other words the interplay between the sign-maker’s interests and the available semiotic resources,which are altered when the sign-maker sits down at thecomputer. In this way, digital technology influences thesemiotic work invested in sign production and hencealso the learning arising from this work.

Coding and choices as semiotic work

When we choose to express something through theproduction of signs, we encounter resistance. Thisresistance can be related both to what we can expressand how we can express it, i.e. our choice of both signi-fied and signifier. Both aspects involve semiotic work.Digital media make this work easier for us by giving usthe possibility to choose text instead of to code it.

The term code has been given various definitions insemiotics, some of them widely comprehensive (seee.g. Barthes, 1957/1997;1970). In this article, code isgiven a narrower definition, as conventional rules forcombinations of written characters. At the sametime, all digital text (pictures, animations, video, etc.)is also based on coding. When texts are digitalised,they are coded in basically the same way, as thenumbers zero and one. Consequently, written text,pictures, animations and video-clips, regardless oftheir scope and multimodal complexity, are technicallyavailable to us with the same investment of semioticwork. In word-processing software, for example, thecommands copy and paste are used to incorporate athree-minute video-clip or a single word. By giving usthe possibility to choose a number of signs as fullycoded texts, digital technology thereby intervenes inour semiotic work. In turn, therefore, digital technol-ogy also intervenes in the learning that takes placewhen we create text.

A study of digital media, literacy and learning

Kress relates different modes to different ‘‘principlesfor learning’’ and asserts that ‘‘it is possible to see

learning as the individual’s agentive selection from,engagement with and transformation of the worldaccording to their principles’’(Kress, 2007a,p. 37). Butthe principles we use to transform our experienceinto concepts or other forms of representation are onlyone aspect of the learning process. When digital mediaare associated with semiotic work (understood aslearning) we must in my view, as mentioned in theintroduction, also ask: how much semiotic work will beinvested in this case in recreating the sign? Whataspect of this semiotic work can digital media help uswith? What does this help mean in terms of what welearn?

To answer these questions, I shall take as my point ofdeparture a study I have made of children’s multi-modal text production in a classroom. In the article‘‘Digitalized story-making in the classroom: asocial semiotic perspective on gender, multimodalityand learning’’ (Skaar, 2007) I examine how girls andboys in a fifth-year primary school class use text andimages to create their own stories at the computer. Incombining written text and images the pupils used theclassroom computers to create their stories as multi-modal discourses (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001).The backdrop of the study is that research points tomarked differences in girls’ and boys’ interest forwriting, for telling stories and for using computertechnology. This study has bearing on the questionsabove because it also shows a connection between theuse of signs, learning and digital technology that goesbeyond an indication of gender differences in them-selves.

With regard to self-discourse I found that the girlsgenerally base their story on their own person, theirown body and their own personal experience. Incontrast, the boys tell stories about a superherofulfilling a mission.

The girls’ and boys’ multimodal textual choices showthe same pattern. Within the constraints of their digitalskills and capabilities, the girls prefer semioticresources that afford them the best opportunity todescribe feelings and intimate interpersonal relations.In this case this means that they prefer to use writtentext. They do not choose to find pictures and symbolson the Internet to nearly the same extent as the boys do.Conversely, the boys in the study choose, to a greaterdegree than the girls, to use pre-coded signs (in theform of pictures and symbols) in their stories. The girls,on the other hand, tend more to code the signsthemselves through the use of writing.

Gender differences in relation to self-disclosure are arobust finding in studies of girls’ and boys’ story tellingin the classroom (Gray Schlegel and Gray Schlegel,1996; Romantowski and Trepanier-Street, 1987; Tucket al., 1985). In the field of psychology, Furman (1996, p.60) describes this gender difference as ‘‘one of the mostconsistent findings in the literature’’.


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With regard to the questions raised in the introductionto this article, however, the interesting finding in mystudy is that gender differences in relation to self-disclosure come consistently to the fore not only in theboys’ and girls’ discursive, but also in their semioticchoices. The difference in their interest in self-disclosure covaries in other words with a differencein how the boys and girls use the semiotic resources attheir disposal when they embark on their story tellingon the computer.

So what do these differences imply for girls’ andboys’ actual learning in the case examined? Jewittand Kress relate multimodality to learning by main-taining that we learn from experience that there is not‘‘an exact fit’’ (2003, p. 13) between our intendedmeaning and our expressed meaning. At the sametime, learning is also often described as ‘‘the acquisi-tion of knowledge’’. We succeed in making knowledgeour own when we manage to articulate it ‘‘in your ownwords’’, as school exercises put it. In this lies a generalperception of learning as the assumption of some kindof ownership over the knowledge-based discourse.This ownership is expressed through the ability tochoose how we wish to present it within a givenmode.

The work of finding ‘‘an exact fit’’ comprises a numberof choices for which computers and new media help toset the premises through providing us with semioticresources. If we want to describe a car in the writtenmode, we must make choices so that letters becomewords, words sentences and sentences text. If wechoose to draw, we do not need to conform to a set ofconventional signs (letters and words) but our inten-tional meaning is expressed through semiotic workmaterialised in a number of consecutive (analogue)choices as the pencil is guided over the paper. If wechoose instead to copy a picture of a car from theInternet we only relate to the car through that onechoice. Both writing and drawing, on the other hand,require us to make choices on more levels. In this sensethe choice of the digital picture of the car gives lessroom for experiencing that there is not ‘‘an exact fit’’between what the sign signifies and what we wanted toexpress by choosing it.

In the study, the girls are seen to code their own writingto a greater extent than the boys do, while the boys incontrast choose to use pictures rather than writing.Digital images are pre-coded signs that require fewerchoices than the written texts, which the pupils makeor code themselves. In this sense social semioticsprovides a theoretical basis for holding that the girls inthis case learn more than the boys because they chooseto express themselves through writing. They therebyassociate themselves with the signs they use throughmaking more choices than the boys do. More choicesincrease the perception of difference between theirintended meaning and their expressed meaning, andlearning thereby increases too.

Coding of writing and choice of pictures

When pupils write they have to engage in semiotic workin which their interests are given expression throughtheir own continuous combining of written charactersto form words and sentences. If they allow theirinterests to be expressed through their choice of images,the dynamic is quite different. They can limit them-selves to choosing; they do not need to code. Writing, onthe other hand, requires choices involving contrasts andcombinations on different structural levels. RomanJakobson (1952) points out that verbal language requiresus to relate simultaneously to the paradigmatic (choiceof words) and the syntagmatic axis (combination ofwords). In the story-making study referred to earlier,signified and signifier, interest and representationalform become written text only after the pupils havemade both paradigmatic and syntagmatic choices.

Pictures, on the other hand, require only paradigmaticchoices. The pupils in the study can select pictures, forexample from a menu, and then combine them at will intheir stories. To express themselves through pictures, inother words, they are not obliged to obey a code basedon taking simultaneous paradigmatic and syntagmaticchoices. Pictures can also be organised on syntagmaticprinciples but this is not a necessity. Manovich calls this‘‘the logic of selection’’ since he asserts that:

‘‘New media objects are rarely created completelyfrom scratch; usually they are assembled from ready-made parts. Put differently, in computer culture,authentic creation has been replaced by selection from amenu’’(Manovich, 2001, p. 124).

Digital media make images immediately available tous and can therefore also immediately involve ourchoices as text producers. This is because images, incontrast to writing, can create meaning independent ofa conventional language code. The signified is meldedwith a signifier before the pupils create the picture‘anew’ as a sign in their own text. It can mean lesssemiotic work than relating to the conventional rulesfor combining written characters. With pictures, digitaltechnology has already done the coding; we mustperform ourselves in our writing. In this respect wemight say that digital media allow us to take a ‘shortcut’ in the coding process. This does not imply that themaking of digital design is any easier than the makingof drawings or pure written text, only that it can beeasier. Manovich uses a DJ’s artistic work as anexample of the opposite:

‘‘The essence of the DJ’s art is the ability to mix selectedelements in rich and sophisticated ways. In contrast the‘cut and paste’ metaphor . . . that suggest that selectedelements can be simply, almost mechanically, combined,the practice of live electronic music demonstrates thattrue art lies in the ‘mix’ (Manovich, 2001, p. 135).


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This is not incompatible, however, with the fact that inpupils’ work with their own stories’ resistance, i.e. theindispensable requirement for semiotic work, is great-est when writing and least when choosing pictures.Pictures do not need to be developed like a written text,i.e. through the combination of letters, words andsentences. Nevertheless, as Manovich points out,pictures can form part of an advanced design requiringjust as much semiotic work as the use of writing. Thepoint is that it is also possible for us to expressourselves through pictures in a far simpler way, i.e.without the need to follow coding in the form ofconventional principles of composition. On the otherhand, this possibility is not open to us when we expressourselves through writing.

The association here is that pictorial language is notsubject to the same extent as written language to aconventional linguistic code and hence it follows thatcoding is not a necessary condition for using images intext creation.

Ease and resistance in semiotic work

Digital media make the blending of different modes(writing and pictures) easier for the pupils in the story-making study. At the same time, resistance is a premisefor learning. If digital technology is to promotelearning, ease cannot only result in pupils avoidingengaging in semiotic work they are otherwise obligedto perform in order to learn. The lack of difficulty mustalso entail their choosing to meet more resistancethrough semiotic work, either as extended productionof written text or additional semiotic work in the formof digital design.

Digital media give pupils the opportunity to expressthemselves through pictures made by others. Theinterests expressed through these pictures can create asense of involvement in the pupils. This is a well-known pedagogical principle. The pupils watch a filmthat arouses a certain curiosity and stimulates them tomake a text involving more active interaction with thematerial. The ease of this involvement can stimulatethem to meet the considerably greater resistance in aprocess in which they are required to create somethingthemselves. New digital media allow these two aspectsof text-creating work to meld into one. For increasedlearning to happen, however, it is necessary for moreresistance to be overcome through more semiotic work.It is not enough just to be entertained.

The girls in the study referred to made their interestsknown, albeit, generally, through a form of representa-tion, writing, that required more choices than the boys’selection of pictures. In other words, the girls’ interestin telling stories about their own experiences wasstrong enough for them to do the semiotic work the actof writing required of them. The boys, in contrast, weregenerally not as interested as the girls in story telling.

They did not write as much and chose to a muchgreater extent to express themselves by means ofready-coded pictures which digital technology madeavailable to them. This short cut in their semiotic workcame from their having chosen signs that were alreadyproducts of other people’s semiotic work. The pupils’choices here show that pictures did not provide anystimulus for further semiotic work among those whowere least interested in telling stories in writing, in thiscase the boys.

In this situation, the pupils had been assigned the taskof writing a text, which they were free to illustrate withpictures. It could be said that the use of the word‘illustrated’ in the assignment given to the pupilsindicates writing as a primary form of expression. Analternative could have been for the pupils to be askedto produce a story in a richer variety of modes (writing,pictures, animations, video-clips, audio, etc.), whichwould have been closer to the forms of digital storytelling developed in recent years (Hull and Nelson,2005). However, the purpose of the study was not tohighlight the vast range of new possibilities formultimodal complexity open to them when pupilsdevelop stories on the computer but rather to ask whatdigital access to other semiotic resources than writingmay mean for pupils’ learning. The alternative towriting in this case was pictures and the choices thiscreates are sufficient to produce the oppositionbetween ease and resistance described above.

To sum up, we can say that the study shows that digitalmedia open up two simultaneous possibilities forpupils. Firstly, the possibility of creating a moreadvanced (multimodal) text and secondly, the possi-bility of creating this text with less semiotic work thanbefore. If a sign is made by someone else, that person’sinterest is already invested in the sign. When pupilsrecreate such a sign in their own digital design, theyrelate to this sign through choices that enable their ownchoices to be made visible to a varying degree. Thesimplest way is to let the sign speak for itself. Ifsubstantial semiotic work has already been invested inthe sign, pupils can achieve a very fine result with lesssemiotic work than if they attempted to make the signthemselves. Digital media thus allow them the possi-bility of making their own text richer and more advan-ced but also of disguising their own shortcomings astext creators. The text does not necessarily reflect theirparticipation in the production process, i.e. their ownwork in giving their interests representation form, northerefore does it reflect what has been learned. In apedagogical context, this represents a problem wemust take into consideration when relating digitalmedia to multimodality, literacy and learning.

In defence of writing

Kress maintains that media create the basis for amultimodal form of representation that undermines


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writing’s traditional dominance as a mode of expres-sion. Kress explains writing’s historical hegemony inideological terms. He argues that even though writingis still the primary means of communication for theelite the picture will increasingly displace writing inthe transition from printed page to screen (Kress, 2005).

This ideological thinking, in which the use of writingis associated with power, can be found again in Kress’proposal for a social semiotic theory of learning. Theoriginal liberation programme from Hodge and Kress’Social Semiotics (1988), where the purpose of theanalysis was to reveal the connection between theuse of language and power, has been transferred tothe mode of communication. Power is now associatedwith writing as mode and Kress seeks liberation fromthe ideological hegemony of writing through multi-modal social semiotics which:

‘‘promises a theory of learning which unifies humanengagement with the world in all its ways, and allows theexpansion of the notion of concept well beyond thestiflingly, inappropriately narrow conceptions of linguis-tic abstractions’’ (Kress, 2007b, p. 65).

According to his view, pupils’ texts should be assessedin terms of the ‘‘interests and principles’’ underlyingthem instead of the school’s requirements for pupils toconform to (written) conventions:

‘‘Evaluation of interest and principles at work in learningwould lead to entirely different forms and conceptions ofassessment than those of conformity to power in itsmanifold forms’’ (Kress, 2007b, p. 66).

In the first instance, it is difficult to see how thisprogramme could be satisfied in practice, and Kresshimself points to the challenge implicit in trying toassess pupils’ texts without relating them to what hecalls ‘‘paramount institutional authority’’.

The basis for this article was less the ideological thanthe pedagogical consequences of the fact that digitaltechnology and new media have changed the premisesfor literacy and multimodal text production. Kressfocuses on the liberation latent in the multimodalchoices made available to us through the new media. Itis true that digital media democratise the possibilitiesopen to the general public of a more varied andcomprehensive text production than ever before, bothin and outside school. Participating in this textproduction naturally implies a richer potential forlearning. From a pedagogical perspective, however,digital media also allow users to omit or avoid semioticwork. For the teachers in the study, the task was toinvolve the pupils in telling a story. For the pupils, theirdesire to give expression to an interest was the basis forinvesting semiotic work in the multimodal discoursethey were asked to make and, through that, also tolearn something.

Digital technology can lead either to pupils’ avoidanceof, or engagement in, this semiotic work. The formercan mean less learning, the latter more. Kress focuseson the latter alternative but pedagogically speaking theformer is just as relevant. Digital media make itincreasingly easier for us to choose other forms ofexpression than writing. From a pedagogical perspec-tive, there is nevertheless reason to defend thecontinuing hegemony of writing as a mode of expres-sion. This is because writing used in a text-creatingprocess necessarily enforces a resistance in the text-maker’s work of creating a connection between his/her interests and the form of representation, i.e.between the intended meaning and the expressedmeaning. Other modes, in which the signs are alreadybearers of other people’s interests, allow pupils to limitor avoid resistance in this semiotic work. In writing,however, resistance will necessarily entail learningbecause the connection between interest and repre-sentation must be based on the text producer’s ownchoices.

From a learning perspective, writing should retain itsdominant and privileged position even in the newmedia age. In an age affording dizzying possibilitiesfor those wishing to produce texts of any kind, writingis still a guarantor ensuring that we actually engage insemiotic work. Writing forces us to make ourselvesvisible through our own choices of both signified(interest) and signifier (representation). It is thesechoices we learn from.

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CONTACT THE AUTHORHavard Skaar, Junior Research Fellow,Oslo University College, Postboxs 4 St. Olavsplass, 0130 Olso, Norway.e-mail: [email protected]


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