Most people are of the opinion that the stuff of reading is only what we get in a printed form. But illiterate people with no academic background read the whole day long and acquire information needed for their daily life. Yet, they do not carry with them any written materials for their reading.
They are always seen reading. What’s the secret behind reading in such situation? Shouldn’t one go to school to learn how to read and write? The science of reading shows that it is the process where the three entities, the writer, the reader and the written material merge to come up with the information needed or required.
In the process of reading, the concept of top down and bottom up is effectively implemented. The writer puts down his ideas and the reader endeavors to get something out of it through reading. The fore knowledge the reader and the writer heavily contribute to impart and at the same time extract the required information for both parties.
Instances that demonstrate this subtle situation should be carefully approached and handled for clarity sake. Let us say that writer has mechanical background or fore knowledge and treats the idea of car engine in his writing. The reader, with an entirely different background, let’s say music, finds it very difficult to make anything out of what he is reading. Worse, he fails to get the information of his desire. Reading is an active process in which the reader brings his background knowledge through the text to extract information.
The extraction of information depends on how much the reader shares common background with writer. If both have gone through common experience, the reading becomes very easy and so does the extraction of the information. Knowledge about the topic, let’s say The World and if both the reader and the writer are familiar with, the reading becomes easy.
The following two sentences elaborate the situation:
Please, read this book.
I have already read it.
Obviously any student with elementary level education is familiar with the word read and how its past tense is spelt the same way. It is when it is articulated that the present sounds different from the past form. Both the writer and reader have gone through the same experience while at school despite the different schools they have gone to. Such experience-sharing situation makes reading and the extraction of information easy.
Our main concern at this stage is how it is possible to read non-written text in nature. Everywhere we, go we find ourselves surrounded by forceful texts without which we cannot manage ourselves and accomplish thing pertaining to our life day and night.
Our eyes are created to see ting with them and our ears for hearing, and the rest of the five senses of feelings as well.
For instance clouds are the text, the creator is the author, and we, who see them, are the readers. The writer, the text, and the clouds are on the same wave length; the reader out of experience automatically extracts the information he needs, that is the coming of rain. This is because he has known that when clouds gather, the probability of rain falling is very high and the conclusion becomes true easy. A fisher man, sitting by the river bank, when the moon light shimmers on the lake, he extracts the information that the fish are coming his way or going away from him or the wind is blowing on the surface of the lake. He thus prepares himself to take action necessary for fishing or whatever. The step he takes, in accordance with the information he extracts, depends on his fore knowledge or previous experience that helps him to understand the activities going on in the river.
Similarly we are surrounded by visual messages. On billboards, in magazines, on television, on our computer screen, and nearly every public and private space, images of all sorts compete for our attention. They carry messages from corporate advertisers, non-profit organizations, friends and they ask us to buy, to sell, to respond, to understand and to act.
An image passes a message that the reader wishes to grasp easily. The images that conveys the message is hardly a new phenomenon. People have created images for centuries. They are paintings designs, drawings, sketches and they did not simply decorate the inside of caves, temples and so forth, but they also recorded family and community history; taught lessons in religion, culture and politics; and even gave directions to locations. They are very misunderstood and given little importance when it comes to the messages they convey.
New to the experience of the image are the vast numbers and many kinds of images available and the ease with which they may be and are reproduced, copied and reconstructed. To make the locations where they are found as tourist attraction, the governments make additional touches which were not originally designed for.
Advertisers depend on people automatically recognizing the message-laden images that they see as they speed down, surf through TV channels or flip through magazines. Some images are effective because they have been around for so long; these images can almost speak for themselves and advertisers do not need many words to convey the accompanying messages. Modern man, meddling in the originality of the ancient images, unless they are on the verge of total dilapidation, makes them worth less in the eyes of keen observers.
In situations where retouch is direly needed, ultra care should be made in the process of the reconstruction lest the message deviates from what it is originally intended for and lest tourists or whoever they are, misinformed and arrive at a wrong conclusion about the image and its location. In need of trying to gain pecuniary returns and advantages, a biased history can be established only to embarrass the owners of the history. As much us countries pride themselves on belonging to a country with pictures, icons and so forth, they misconstrue them for immediate money return which may not last as long as the images, and thus deprive them of the honor they could deserve. Let’s be thoughtful of what we do to everything that embodies our history and our national pride!
The Ethiopian Herald June 30, 2019
BY JOSEPH SOBOKA
