The Given and the New

In Kress & VanLeeuwen's Reading Images, they talk about the idea of how everything visual comes with a "given" and a "new," and how in different types of media such as advertisements in magazines, interviews, books or whatever - there is this idea that people purposefully place things that people know on the left side and "new" information on the right side. When I read this, I felt like it was pretty obvious for things such as advertisements, but I was a little skeptical (maybe a lot skeptical...) about how they said painters back in the day such as Rembrandt used this technique in his paintings. This reminded me of when I took IB in highschool, and how our teachers emphasized certain themes or symbols in the book. For instance, they would rant on and on about how the curtains in the book were the color blue, and how the author uses it as a hidden theme to express depression and sadness. So that was my little stance on how I felt about that...
As usual, I wanted to prove these guys wrong about their theory. But after flipping through and looking at my Introduction to Mass Communication's textbook The Media of Mass Communication by John Vivian, I thought perhaps there was indeed, some truth in the "Given" and "New" thing regarding the layout. On page 176, the random page that I am now flipped to is actually an example!



On the left side of the page is a picture of the man, who although not everyone may know who he is (Marc Anderssen), its still a picture/familiar name that people may have heard in passing or something. On the other side, is full text, depicting who this man is and other information about his accomplishments and his involvement within the media industry. That, I suppose, would count as the "Given" and "New" thing, where the given is the name/picture of the man, and the new are long detailed explanations of his character and life accomplishments. As someone who merely skims through much of long text, I don't believe I've ever really taken a moment to analyze/appreciate (?) the layout of textbooks. Perhaps I'll take a better look next time when I'm flipping the pages of Cosmo or People or something...yay guilty pleasures!