What do you mean, it’s gone? : multimodal narratives and rereading (2011)
Hypertextual narratives have given way to reader-driven narratives driven by advances in online technology and communities, and the merging of various technologies to create new spaces for the development of narrative. However, what is sometimes overlooked in the excitement over the possibilities raised by emerging media is that there are significant losses involved. I argue that the impossibility of rereading multimodal texts (created in a collaboration of writer, reader, and medium) presents a problem for interpretation: without rereading, some kinds of interpretive processes are permanently disabled. Since these processes—the refinement of hypotheses, the discovery of new interpretations, and the integration of conclusions—are central to critical reading, we should understand the implications for literacy in the multiplication of transitory texts. I urge a reconsideration of multimodal narratives, and suggest embedding interpretation within a reader-generated response to help harness the power of image, sound, text, and technology.
Anne Furlong, Ph.D. (Linguistics), UCL, is a professor in the Department of English, at the University of Prince Edward Island.