Henry Jenkins and good ol' Kress

Kress (2003) stresses that modern literacy requires the ability to express ideas across a broad
range of different systems of representation and signification (including “words, spoken or written;
image, still and moving;musical...3D models...”). Each medium has its own affordances, its
own systems of representation, its own strategies for producing and organizing knowledge.
Participants in the new media landscape learn to navigate these different and sometimes conflicting
modes of representation and to make meaningful choices about the best ways to express
their ideas in each context.All of this sounds more complicated than it is.As the New Media
Consortium’s 2005 report on twenty-first century literacy suggests,“Young people adept at
interpreting meaning in sound,music, still and moving images, and interactive components not
only seem quite able to cope with messages that engage several of these pathways at once, but
in many cases prefer them” (online source).
Kress argues that this tendency toward multimodality changes how we teach composition,
because students must learn to sort through a range of different possible modes of expression,
determine which is most effective in reaching their audience and communicating their message,
and to grasp which techniques work best in conveying information through this channel.
Kress advocates moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the
basic expressive competency of the modern era.This shift does not displace printed texts with
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images, as some advocates of visual literacy have suggested.Rather, it develops a more complex
vocabulary for communicating ideas that requires students to be equally adept at reading and
writing through images, texts, sounds, and simulations.The filmmaker George Lucas (Daly,
2004, online source/no page number) offers an equally expansive understanding of what literacy
might mean today:
We must teach communication comprehensively in all its forms.Today we work with the
written or spoken word as the primary form of communication. But we also need to
understand the importance of graphics,music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and
in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people’s culture.We live and work in a
visually sophisticated world, so we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of communication,
not just the written word.
In short, new media literacies involve the ability to think across media, whether understood at
the level of simple recognition (identifying the same content as it is translated across different
modes of representation), or at the level of narrative logic (understanding the connections
between story communicated through different media), or at the level of rhetoric (learning to
express an idea within a single medium or across the media spectrum).Transmedia navigation
involves both processing new types of stories and arguments that are emerging within a convergence
culture and expressing ideas in ways that exploit the opportunities and affordances
represented by the new media landscape. In other words, it involves the ability to both read and
write across all available modes of expression.