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monitoring order
Kress and van Leeuwen write of this themselves: unlike Arnheim and Bang, they do not base their observations about the meaning structures of pages on an immediate, universal, bodily experience of the world, the possiblity of such universal experience having been called into question in writings of many disciplines. Instead, Kress and van Leeuwen acknowledge how our cultural contexts impinge on layouts:

    .... we are largely concerned with the description of the visual semiotic of Western cultures. Cultures which have long-established reading directions of a different kind (right to left or top to bottom) are likely to attach different values to these positions. In other words, reading directions may be the material instantiations of deeply embedded cultural value systems. (199)

Unlike Arnheim and Bang, Kress and van Leeuwen also emphasize the possibility of individual response to the orderings of two-dimensional works, whose

    structure is ideological in the sense that it may not correspond to what is the case either for the produced or the consumer of the image or layout: the important point is that the information is presented as though it had that status or value for the reader, and that readers have to read it within that structure, even if that valuation may then be rejected by a particular reader. (187)

I have thus ended this section similarly to how I ended the section on book design, needing to ask how we have come to see in visual design what we—in our particular places and times—do, and needing to acknowledge how others might see differently.

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