Multimodality has always been relevant to communicating meanings. As the mediascape evolves, the theorizing of multimodality has taken a new course to account for the distinct possibilities and constraints of each mode, and the constitution of meanings in multimodal wholes (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O'Halloran, 2016). In this talk I will illustrate the importance of a multimodal perspective in social media research – amid a plethora of semiotic resources, attending to the linguistic mode alone is not adequate.
The context of this talk concerns how female and male professional tennis players represent their genders on the social media platform Instagram. The dataset of 99 Instagram posts was assembled during the 2018 Wimbledon Championships. Data were analyzed using a social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis. Fairclough (1995)'s sociocultural approach to critical discourse analysis and Kress & van Leeuwen (2006)'s visual grammar were also drawn on.
The analysis highlights the meaning-making potentials and constraints of Instagram. It is demonstrated that Instagram is a semiotic artefact that contributes to multimodal meaning making by presenting preselected semiotic resources with implied semiotic principles (Poulsen & Kvåle, 2018). In other words, Instagrammers do have agency, but only to a certain extent. To illustrate how multimodality can be applied to analysing Instagram posts, the gendered theme of body in motion is discussed. It is argued that some female players represent themselves in a 'hyperreal' manner (Baudrillard, 1983). Their images are less naturalistic, and the accompanying captions allude to non-sports contexts. Consequently, the body could be gendered in such a way that the female athletic body (and the athletic space it occupies) is less authentic, reinforcing the dominance of men in sports.
Towards the end of the talk, the significance of adopting a multimodal lens in social media research is emphasized. The distinct meanings produced by each mode and how they are combined to form a multimodal whole underpinning the gendered discourse are discussed. The complexity of addressing multimodality in social media is also considered.
References
Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations (P. Foss, P. Patton, & P. Beitchman, Trans.). Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Media discourse. New York: E. Arnold.
Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J., & O'Halloran, K. (2016). Introducing multimodality. London: Routledge.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Poulsen, S. V., & Kvåle, G. (2018). Studying social media as semiotic technology: A social semiotic multimodal framework. Social Semiotics, 28(5), 700-717.
