Text, Visuals, Context and Cultural Understanding

Comic Book Superheroes Unleashed on History Channel

In one of my courses yesterday we reviewed Multimodal Literacy through the lens of manga and comic books. We were to bring artifacts to class and the above link was my artifact. A discussion ensued whether text or visuals required more background information to process, i.e. did you need an awareness of the "society" or "culture" to understand what was happening with both text and visuals and which was easier to understand outside of "context." Well as a group we didn't come to any conclusions but this does have some real implications when you think of mobile devices and communities of practice. Is a knowledge of the community an integral part of the practice of "learning" how to use a mobile device and once learned using that mobile device to learn other things like math or language.