New Media Design's Language

Radan Martinec and Theo van Leeuwen discuss some important concepts in their book "The Language of New Media Design: Theory and Practice." They claim that the idea of their book is that new media are connected to images, sounds, and texts. They write that we call this connection non-linear models which are "semantic constructs that map out the relations between concepts in the semantic fields, or fields of meaning, that underlie new media products" (1).

New media is models after systemic linguistics. Systemic linguistics describes language as something that starts of as something general and becomes more specific. This is accomplished as a result of numerous choices. There are sex key elements from systemic-functional linguistics. Some of them explain that "there are systems of choices for all aspects of meaning" and that "linguistic choices are driven by communicative purposes" (4). An important argument is that new media does not have they physical limitations of books though since it is electronic.

Based off of this model, there is usually one underlying topic. For the sake of explaining, I am going to use the topic of countries. There are two models that are explained as non-linear models. First, there is the tree. In this case, there would be the topic of countries. Then it would branch out into northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere. Then it could branch out further into those that are a part of separate continents. And it can go from there into government style, population, etc. Second, there is the star. This would start off with countries as the topic in the center. Then there would be sub-categories that are different from each other but are connected by the fact that they are countries. So, there can be some countries chosen at random (Brazil, Japan, Canada, France, Egypt) where the only thing that they have in common is that they're countries.

The models can be a lot more difficult than these two standard models. There are cases when there are no "center" topic. That is something Martinec and van Leeuwen discuss later in the book.