‘The politics behind the swipe’ – Braziel 2015
When you go onto a webpage, what do you see? Is it just a block of text? Maybe; however a lot of the time its a variety of pictures, text, GIFS, hyperlinks etc… Originally books were the only ‘form’ of original media and often included blocks of text and a few hand-drawn pictures as printing was not, at this time, accessible.
Cameras were then starting to become popular in 1885-1889; firstly the KODAK Camera. This hugely helped multimodality within texts as this camera was easy to use, and provided, at the time, high quality images in a somewhat ‘mass quantity’. This meant that, alongside the printing press, things like newspapers became highly popular due to the multimodal features and image-text cohesion. Just think, when was the last time you read a newspaper without an image within?
However an even bigger question, when was the last time you actually read a newspaper? The technology surrounding multimodality has become so advanced that the internet, a worldwide source of information, has not only images and text, but videos and hyperlinks allowing you to go from page to page with ease. Look how easy was that, now you’re at my previous blog, make sure to give it a read!
Images we see online nowadays are very often raw, no edits involved, images. The editing of photos used to be a skill for professionals and to a certain degree it still is, however the introduction of filters on apps like Snapchat and Instagram means that it is possible for any person to edit a photo to a good standard. But what does this have to do with mode? Well, these apps allow for the manipulation of a mode. Like deleting text, but, an image…
So you know when you type something out and realise, thats not right, you backspace and delete it. In fact I’ve had to do that many times on this blog alone. Now you can do that with an imagine. And the main goal of doing so? It allows you to manipulate how you look to please certain groups of people. In an ever-growing self conscious society, the power of editing allows people to have a form of self confidence that they could not have before. However too much editing can be seen as a bad thing. If it is too obvious and people notice it, you can seem ‘fake’ and the reputation you may or may not have gained online can be destroyed with a simple comment.
Language and New Media 