Multimodality
On this webpage, you will learn how to answer the following questions:
- What is multimodality?
- Why is multimodal composition important?
- Examples of Multimodal Projects
What Is Multimodality?
By Dan Martin
Multimodality is not a new term or idea. Many people use multimedia and multimodal interchangably despite the differences between the terms. Multimedia is a term more closely associated with the production and delivery of media and multimodality is a term more closely associated with composing with media and creating a multimedia product. A more important distinction to make is between the terms mode and medium. These two terms are different. A mode is a sound, image, animation, or text (writing) while a medium is something that contains different modes and combinations of modes like a TV, radio, computer, or smartphone. People use different modes and mediums to design a variety of messages on a variety of platforms for different purposes and goals. Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus (2013) define multimodal composing as “the conscious manipulation of the interaction among various sensory experiences—visual, verbal, tactical, aural—used in the processes or producing and reading texts” (7). This definition highlights the rhetorical, semiotic, and intertextual nature of multimodal and digital forms that require critical multimodal literacies to interpret.
Learning how to read multimodal and digital text and forms requires learning new conventions and standards for reading combinations of image, text, and sound. Multimodal projects ask readers "to perform, or rather, produce [the author’s] argument for themselves” (Ball, 419). Multimodal texts allow audiences numerous ways to generate meaning because “Meaning is made through the reader’s choice and arrangement of multimodal fragments” (Ball 420). Multimodal and digital forms provide users an opportunity to forge their own experience with multimodal content
- A multimodal form is a multidimensional space in which a multitude of semiotic materials, none of them original, blend and clash within various mediums.
- The multimodal form is a combination of semiotic materials and modes (images, sounds, text).
- A multimodal rhetor’s only power is to mix modes and mediums.
- The multimodal form is a network of signs.
- Multimodal forms are disentangled and not deciphered.
- To have an author of a multimodal form is to limit that form (146-47).
We can use these six semiotic principles of multimodal texts as a method for questioning the multidimensional spaces where authorless networks of semiotic materials must be disentangled. This further exposes the original contexts for each and every type of text involved in formulating a a new text. When approaching the reading of online material and social media, we should remember that the information has been pieced together from other materials, and that each one of those materials has an original context.
Why Is Multimoda Composition Important?
Sample Projects
- Super Mario Bros and the Rhetoric of Sound