Assignment Week 2

In your journal post, consider the concept of interactive participant and represented participant as identified in the semiotic theory in Kress and Van Leeuwen Chapter 2 and its link to the social context of literacy.  

Kress and van Leeuwen substitute the word participants for objects because this term is more precise in meaning because the term participants signifies some type of relationship between the participants.  In addition, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) state that there are “two types of participants involved in every semiotic act” (p. 48).  These are “interactive participants” and “represented participants” (p.48).  Kress and Van Leeuwen say that it is the participants who speak, listen, write and read or make images or view them (p. 48).  The participants are the ones doing something actively.  The represented participants are the people, places, or things (including abstract things) represented by speech or writing or image (p. 48).  The represented participants are the participants that the interactive participants are speaking, writing, or producing images about (p. 48). 

Kress and van Leeuwen point out that social meanings underlie all communication by interactive participants (p. 20).   In addition, whatever communication is undertaken by a participant occurs in a “social context” (p. 15).  The patterns of representation and the patterns of interaction all take place in a “social context” (p. 15). 

Kress and van Leeuwen also say that every visual design (like all semiotic modes) fulfills three major functions (metafunctions): the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual (p 42-44).  The concept of metafunctions has been taken from Michael Halliday’s work on linguistics.  

Kress and van Leeuwen think that the visual, like all semiotic modes, has to serve several representational and communication requirements.  These requirements can be represented by the three metafunctions.  As applied to the visual, social interactions underlie these metafunctions.  The ‘interpersonal function is “a function of enacting social interactions as social relations” (p. 15).

Kress and van Leeuwen point out, in terms of the ‘interpersonal metafunction’ that any semiotic mode has to be able to project the relations between the producer of a (complex) sign, and the receiver/producer of that sign.  That is, any mode has to be able to represent a particular social relation between the producer, the viewer and the object represented” (p. 42).

Kress and van Leeuwen say that “visual communication is always coded” (p. 32).  Coded communications is dependent on the culture or society it arises out of (p. 34).  Therefore, the culture is the social context for coded communications, whether written or visual.

Kress and van Leeuwen state that “semiotic modes, similarly, are shaped both by the intrinsic characteristics and potentialities of the medium and by the requirements, histories, and values of societies and their cultures” (p. 35).  Thus, semiotic modes are determined by the social context in which they arise out of.

Kress and van Leeuwen point out that a depicted person may be shown to address viewers directly, by looking at the camera (p. 43).  “This conveys a sense of interaction between the depicted person and the viewer.  But a depicted person may also be shown as turned away from the viewer, and this conveys the absence of a sense of interaction” (p. 43).  

In sum, participants are involved in relationships with one another and these relationships between the interactive and represented participants take place in a social context, which often depends on culture.

References

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design.

    London, New York: Routledge.