Abstract
Multimodality is now well established in the study of linguistics and communicative practice in the context of digital media. However, much of the research in digital discourse analysis still focuses exclusively on language and linguistic phenomena. Visualizing digital discourse is committed to respecting the richness of multimodal and visual resources in analyzing online and micro-level interaction shaped by digital identities, activities and culture in the digital social world. It seeks to illustrate how visuality in digital discourse is handled and presented by users through interdisciplinary approaches, such as critical sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and social semiotics.
This book is divided into three main sections comprising 12 chapters. Following a brief introduction, Jones relates the embodied nature of visual semiotics through looking, seeing, and being components constituting the right to look in the flagship chapter devoted to selfies and surveillance culture in the smartphone era. The right to look is perhaps the most important component of visuality because that is what makes looking and seeing, and even, to some degree, being, possible. Through negotiating our right to look at others and ourselves, we stake out our position in the world, laying claim both to our autonomy and to our connectedness to our social worlds (p. 38). In the same vein, each subsequent part of the book begins with a chapter by a scholar of digital/visual discourse studies that combine micro-level communicative practices with macro-level perspectives to highlight the depth and breadth of visual communication.
The three chapters in Part 1 focus on new-media visuality – emojis and their communicative practices. In Chapter 2, Thurlow and Jaroski discuss the emergence of a discourse of language endangerment due to the spread of emojis. We witness a redirection of discourses of linguistic degradation or ruin ascribed to technological affordances of visual communication, specifically emojis. Chapter 3, by Albert, compares symbols with words in written practices, illustrating that emojis in written discourse are complicated and should be viewed as a phenomenon sui generis rather than as images or graphemes. Based on a large corpus of SMSs, Chapter 4 examines the key syntactic functions and grammatical significance of emojis in text messages. Panckhurst and Frontini show that emojis are more often used in the final closure positions of text messages than in the middle or beginning of messages.
Part 2 delves into everyday visual sources that matter to people, which are used for self-presentation and self-expression by video gamers, romantic partners managing relationships and close friends in online communication. In Chapter 5, Leppänen probes Finland-based blogging mothers, who revisualize and recontextualize motherhood on social media in parodic ways through multimodality and critical sociolinguistics. She argues that Shitty Mother’s Diary could indeed be seen as a form of political critique that uses parody to ridicule normative discourses and (visual) representations of gender, class, and motherhood (p. 125), as well as an attempt to give voice to the lower-class mother and a deviation from the ideals of motherhood. Chapter 6 adopts an Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis approach to examine how video gamers combine verbal and visual means to make their videos comprehensible, entertaining, and watchable. Schmidt and Marx argue that the basic activity structure of Let’s Plays is a ‘cybernetic control loop’ that cannot be solely realized by visual presentations. Verbal comments can transform a stream of visual events into comprehensible actions (p. 148). The last two chapters in this section report distinctive visual affordances for constructing relations and sharing experiences, including virtual tours (Cserző) and photo sharing (Venema and Lobinger) with the same theme of relational maintenance.
The third part focuses on visuality in institutional and commercial contexts rather than in personal and interpersonal contexts. In Chapter 9, the topical focus is the role of image-centricity shaped by technological and digital affordances in both old and new media. Stöckl holds that image-centricity appears to be a long-familiar phenomenon, which may be reconfigured and co-constructed in social media with the aid of media traits, such as shareability and the collaborative nature of meaning-making. Chapter 10 outlines how Switzerland’s two major supermarket chains use Instagram to visualize and construct the social meaning of food and eating through social semiotics. Portmann shows that semiotic strategies, such as visual materiality and modality, can fashion banal goods and construct privileged eating practices. The incorporation of visual symbols and corporate marketing embodies the interdisciplinary characteristics of digital discourse analysis. In Chapter 11, Pflaeging presents a diachronic analysis of the viral online genre known as the ‘listicle’ collected from Distractify (a viral content creator on Facebook) and explores the interrelations between conviviality, virality, and genre. Over the period researched, the listicle changed considerably (from images to words and from lists to stories) due to embedded tweets and the commercial function of the viral genre. The final chapter focuses on multimodality in construing credibility in digital media. Meer and Staubach analyze how social media influencers present their purchases in haul videos on YouTube, arguing that credibility is largely supported by the multimodal (specifically visual) construction of a common place in which influencers and viewers seem to be tangibly co-present (p. 266).
This book contributes to the field of digital discourse studies by addressing a different visuality (and multimodality) – previously neglected in digital media – which is meaningful in the construction of interpersonal relationships, social meaning, and credibility. In addition, the volume analyzing digital discourse from interpersonal, institutional, and commercial perspectives sheds light on the topic, to the benefit of researchers interested in digital communication, media, and multimodal studies. Overall, with its varied topics and interdisciplinary methodologies, this volume is an inspiring read.