Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication

Description

The 21st century is awash with ever more mixed and remixed images, writing, layout, sound, gesture, speech, and 3D objects. Multimodality looks beyond language and examines these multiple modes of communication and meaning making. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication represents a long-awaited and much anticipated addition to the study of multimodality from the scholar who pioneered and continues to play a decisive role in shaping the field. Written in an accessible manner and illustrated with a wealth of photos and illustrations to clearly demonstrate the points made, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication deliberately sets out to locate communication in the everyday, covering topics and issues not usually discussed in books of this kind, from traffic signs to mobile phones. In this book, Gunther Kress presents a contemporary, distinctive and widely applicable approach to communication. He provides the framework necessary for understanding the attempt to bring all modes of meaning-making together under one unified theoretical roof. This exploration of an increasingly vital area of language and communication studies will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and applied linguistics, media and communication studies and education. Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Where meaning is the issue Multimodality: simple, really From semiotic system to semiotic resource Cultural difference and communication: the 'reach' of the theory and the 'reach' of modes The politics of naming A satellite view of language Chapter 2 The social environment of contemporary communication An ethical approach to communication Assumptions Environments for communication: social frames and communicational possibilities Power, authority and authorship Social and theoretical consequences: ruling metaphors of participation, design, and production Personal choices: existential insecurity or agency through participation and connection Communication and meaning: fluidity, provisionality, instability A prospective theory of communication: rhetoric, design, production From language and grammar to semiotic resources Mobility and portability A word on 'pace' The need for apt metaphors Chapter 3 Communication: shaping the domain of meaning Communication as semiotic work: a sketch of a theory 'Reading' and the reader's design of meaning Provisionality in communication: rhetoric and design, newly configured Environments of communication: a historical view Refashioning social and semiotic domains: rhetoric and design Chapter 4 A social-semiotic theory of multimodality From a linguistic to a multimodal social-semiotic theory of meaning and communication Linguistics, pragmatics and a social-semiotic approach to representation Horses for courses: apt theories, useful framing The motivated sign The everyday, the banal and the motivated sign Interest and the partiality of representation Mimesis, signs and embodied experience Chapter 5 Mode Materiality and affordance: the social making of mode The 'reach' of modes What is a mode? Is layout a mode? Mode, meaning, text: 'fixing' and 'framing' Mode as technology of transcription Chapter 6 Meaning as resource: 'naming' in a multimodal social- semiotic theory Naming aptly New frames, new names Making signs: resources, processes and agency Processes and effects: making and remaking meaning Chapter 7 Design and arrangements: making meaning material Design in contemporary conditions of text-making Design: an essential (re)focusing What is design? A homely example Design in social-semiotic environments Changes in design: a brief look at recent history Arrangements: making meanings material What else is framed? Discourse: ontological and epistemological framing Chapter 8 Multimodal orchestrations and ensembles of meaning The world arranged by me; the world arranged for me The world arranged by me, the world arranged for me: orchestrating ensembles, staging of movement, motion, 'pace' Aesthetics, style and ethics in multimodal ensembles Chapter 9 Applying the theory: learning and evaluation; identity and knowledge Learning and identity in a communicational frame Reading as design Semiosis, meaning and learning Recognition, metrics and principles of assessment Chapter 10 The social semiotics of convergent mobile devices: new forms of composition and the transformation of habitus The social frame for the semiotic analysis The affordances of Smartphones: a social-semiotic account Affordances of the hardware 'Shape': designers' intentions and social implications The representational affordances The functionalities Mobile Web access and usability: changes in social habitus Implications Gains and losses: some open questions References Index