Visual media and multimedia literacy… What is it?

‘In a multimedia world, it is not possible to focus exclusively on the spoken or written element, treating everything else as marginal – as non-linguistic extras. All the elements combine in a single communicative act, and their joint roles need to be considered.’

Crystal, D. (2011) Internet Linguistics: A student guide, London: Routledge.

Objectives

On completion of this unit, you will be able to:

define key concepts pertaining to visual media and multimedia literacy
understand and explain why reading and writing visual and multimedia messages in and out of the classroom is important
select resources for the classroom and design visual media and multimedia literacy tasks for your students

Introduction

From tag clouds to infographics, through multimodal stories, games and data visualisation, more and more of nowadays information is conveyed through visual elements. In the image-saturated culture we live in, screens play a crucial part in the way we receive information. Therefore, we need to focus on visual media and multimedia literacy.

Because art is a form of communication, a language, visual literacy has been taught before, teaching students to deconstruct and reconstruct an image, painting, sculpture or any art piece in order to give it a meaning, make it understandable, readable. A visual literate person can read and write visual language.

However, we now broaden this literacy to another level, visual media and multimedia, in which images, sound and video are often intertwined. Multimedia literacy has truly come of age on the internet, ‘the first medium that can act like all media – it can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above’ (Rose, F. 2011, The Art of Immersion: How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories, New York: W.W. Norton). Because there is not literacy when one can only read but not write, students have to learn not just to understand, but to create multimedia messages including image, sound and video like in transmedia storytelling, where narratives are dispersed across multiple platforms.

What is visual media and multimedia literacy?

Definition

Dudeney, Hockly and Pegrum (2014: 11) define visual media and multimedia literacy as “the ability to effectively interpret and create texts in multiple media, notably using images, sounds and video.