All semiotics is multimedia semiotics, and all literacy is multimedia literacy. Analyzing multimedia semiotics has led me to ask some old questions in new ways and to begin to see the history of writing, drawing, calculating, and displaying images visually in a different light. It's been a long time since the technologies of literacy were as simple as pen, ink, and paper; and in the era of print, as before, literacy has rarely meant verbal text alone. Many of the genres of literacy, from the popular magazine article to the scientific research report, combine visual images and printed text in ways that make cross-reference between them essential to understanding them as their regular readers and writers do. No technology is an island. As our technologies become more complex they find themselves situated in larger and longer networks of other technologies and other cultural practices
multimedia literacy; metamedia literacy; multimedia semiotics