Fortune & Kress; Image & Interactivity

Fortune writes about Kress,

"Kress argues that the cultural and social shifts that have precipitated the emergence of visual representation as a dominant (perhaps even the dominant) mode of communication complicates and enlarges the rhetorical situation by introducing the audience’s authority as a factor that shifts significantly when we move from word-dominated to image-dominated discourse. For Kress (2005), the emergence of computer technology as a new medium and the concomitant shift of rhetorical authority to the reader create greater flexibility and responsibility for the author"

Indeed, but Kress' confusion is that the image dominates or initiates that shift from author's authority to audience's authority. In fact, Image doesn't get us to audience's authority, as a history of authorship in artwork reveals, nor do we interact with mere image, in a non-screen medium, in a real interactive way that displaces the image's authorship. It is interaction with the text, whether mono- or multimodal, the ability to "enter" it, move it, transform it, on the screen, that begins to shift authority from the author and to the audience. Again, the image itself does not get us there. Rather, the digital medium -- or to use Kress' metonym, the screen--apart from the image, that takes us into the interactive realm.

The medium of the computer screen was, in fact, designed for writing, not image, with a specific purpose, to move through writing, to create it and change it, interactively, on the screen, detached from the page. The screen was designed to display text and initially would have been useless at its beginning to display image. But the logics of interactivity was there, without image. This was compounded by the develop of Arpanet, the prototype of the Internet, which again, in its infancy was designed to facilitate the interaction and cross-communication of writing systems. These media began to shift authorship, not the image.