"It is often said that television has altered our world."

Procrastinating while planning a paper on cross-media news production and multimodality, I'm currently reading an old classic, Raymond Williams' Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Written in 1973, and perhaps best known for Williams' discussion of television's continuity, its 'flow'. I'm struck by how relevant the discussion and rejection of technological determinism, and the discussion of the relationship between technology and culture are for thinking about today's new media technologies.

NRK.no - Nyheter

Did my two first interviews friday. Talked to a reporter working on web and 'tekst-tv' (similar to Ceefax), and a 'vaktsjef' (senior journalist/shift manager? Will have to figure out how to translate job titles...) in the same department, both working in the Norwegian state broadcaster NRK's News section.

Inside the rings of Saturn

Andrew Morrison's article on multimodal discourse in Computers and Composition, Inside the rings of Saturn, is an application of the concept of multimodality (Kress/van Leeuwen), situated in activity theory. An interesting read. Morrison deals with representations and media in relation to the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Keywords being social network software, blogs, literacy, performativity and web discourse. Escpecially interesting is the part on how Kress does not deal with interface design in his concept of the multimodal. Interfaces provide potentials for meaning-making, according to Andrew, and I agree. I will have to think more about this angle in my work.

Multimodal Discourse

Just finished reading Multimodal Discourse by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Found it highly interesting and potentially relevant for my phd in terms of text production. Had some trouble figuring out what their definition of multimediality actually is, in relation to their concept of multimodality, but van Leeuwen is coming to the department in April, to talk about "The contribution of multimodal discourse analysis to the study of media texts".