Kress may be correct in saying that changes in both the medium and mode of writing are ongoing. But the platform I’m typing into at the moment is evidence that writing itself isn’t as tied to the book as Kress suggests.
As for text, the internet is still largely structured by it as far as discreet parcels of information are concerned. If I want to find an image, video or sound clip, I still have to type in my text, and my success is based on the words that I choose to enter…
If I were to use the analogy of a toddler learning language or making sense of the world around her, it seems to me that the naming (or initially pointing to the object) of the object is extremely important step to communication.
And going back to the example you have above, at the moment the internet requires us to type in the text to search for an image or sound clip. The technology is still driven by text. What if it does not need text? What if it accepts speech? I wonder if that will then releases the ‘text’ as the driver?
Yeah, as soon as I said that I thought of Google Search by Image (http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html), which searches based on a picture rather than words : ) But then I guess the result is either images that look like the one you searched with…or text about it!