The way images are used and understood in today's dominant forms of communication is strikingly different than the way they were most often used and understood when printed text was the preferred site of public discourse in the West. As Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen observe, from sometime during the early modern period until relatively recently, images in public texts tended to be viewed either as individualized artistic expression or as uncoded replicas of reality--as objective snapshots that faithfully represented the world of objects. Readers during this period, in other words, approached images with a particular kind of visual literacy, one in which images were for the most part viewed not as meaningful in themselves, but instead as pointers to the meaning of the "real" world or as illustrations of the text that surrounded them and directed their meaning. Because meaning was to be found primarily in text, the ways that the characteristics of images might both reveal perspectives and be used to produce meaning--say, through specific arrangements of an image's visual elements--received little attention. Images in this "old" visual literacy, to put it simply, did little meaning-making work.

As forms of communication have become increasingly visually-saturated, approaches to images have begun to change. As Steven Johnson points out--and as just about anyone can see simply by surveying our contemporary landscape--images have now become an important part of our reality: our environments are now so visually saturated that images have become naturalized. Images are so often a part of our meaning-making processes that we have come to see them as real in themselves--and capable of generating meanings--rather than as being somehow opposed to the real--capable only of representing or delivering the meaning of the real world. Because images now mean more, viewers tend to pay more attention to how the images they encounter are structured--how individual graphical elements are arranged to suggest value or emphasis; how, in photographs, vectors can suggest particular types of action; and so on. Like the way in which literate readers recognize the rhetorical elements at work in a piece of writing, viewers who approach images with this "new" visual literacy tend to think of images as composed of a number of meaningful, and meaningfully arranged, elements.

This way of seeing, I will argue, is particularly evident in the use and reception of digital images in hypermedia environments like today's World Wide Web. Resourceful uses of that environment's computer-generated images, hyperlinks, and dynamic display technologies are in fact resulting in the emergence of new sets of powerful visual meaning-making conventions--components of new forms of visual literacy that, in some cases, change viewers' approaches to all images, whether analog or digital. An understanding of these literacies--like an understanding of literacy in print-dominated cultures--can help to reveal the ways visual communication in digital contexts works rhetorically: like printed text, digital images take part in processes that can both marginalize and include and that can work to inscribe dominant ideologies or to subvert them.

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