Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen

I initially found the introduction to Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication a bit challenging, but it made a lot more sense after our class discussion. It started off simple enough (I think). Until recently, society preferred monomodality, or using one media, when it came to the arts, whether it was writings, paintings, or concert performances. In the various genres everything was done in the same way. However, now there is more of a variety in the design and a “desire for crossing boundaries (1),” or multimodality. For instance, a great example of multimodal media would be a university Web site, such as www.midwestern.edu. It uses text, pictures, graphics, videos, blogs, sound, etc. to communicate a message to the audience.

I thought that the rest of the introduction was a bit muddy so please bear with me. From what I understand, Kress and Van Leeuwen are particularly concerned with the meanings that are made from media, and they created four strata, or dimensions, where meanings are made: discourse, design, production, and distribution (4).

Discourses are “socially constructed knowledges of reality (5)” that develop from various media (newspaper articles, TV documentaries), conversations, or ideologies, and design is necessary to help people see discourses. These two terms became a bit clearer to me with the example of the architect on page six. The architect designs a house based on the way that he/she believes people live in a house and what they do in their living space.

Production refers to executing a design, and technical skills in a medium are necessary to produce. Distribution is the process of packaging something up and disbursing it to the public. With these latter strata, it helps me to think of the example of music. Musicians play, or produce, music and technicians or sound engineers record the music, to the best possible quality, for mass distribution (7).

However, these strata made the most sense to me in the article about Stephanie’s room in House Beautiful (1996). Via text and pictures, the article tells what three-year-old Stephanie does in her room: she reads, sings and dances with friends, and plays dress-up. Through these details, the magazine provides a discourse of what children do in their bedrooms, and it suggests how their rooms should be designed (13-15). According to Kress and Van Leeuwen, the bedroom is “a medium for communicating to the child, in the language of interior design, the qualities, the pleasures, the duties, and the kind of future her parents desire for her (15).”

Before the parents produced the room (painting, furniture selection, and arrangement) they thought of the design based on how they wanted their daughter to utilize the space. Unfortunately, in this example, distribution, doesn’t really fit in, since there’s only one bedroom. However, designers could produce a model or virtual tour of Stephanie’s room for people to view, and this would fall under distribution (19).

Works Cited

Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen, eds. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001.