Multimodal Design: Academic Musings (Part Two)

‘Jumping, skipping and surfing’ is how Schriver (1997) describes the reading process online. Walsh (2006) says that online readers are involved in a ‘recursive, interactive process’ engaging with fragmented sections of information via multi-directional reading paths.

Readers also have high expectations of what information a website will contain. Walsh uses http://www.wolf.org/wolves/index.asp as a case study to assess how a typical person ‘reads an internet site’ and asks how they gain meaning.

Kress (in Snyder, 1997) also acknowledges the ‘non-linear, rhizomic organization of [online] content’ versus traditional text book reading. He concludes that electronic documents are ‘[a] resource…not read but used’.

What does this mean in practice? Online readers will scan, jump around and pick up the selective information they desire ‘blurring the line between reader and writer’. Document designers are therefore challenged with orchestrating complex multimodal, multimedia textual production into useful, bite-sized information chunks that do not disappoint in content.