Multimodality and Discourse Systems

The Multimodality Satellite of Language@Leeds invites you to the following talk by visiting fellow Ilaria Moschini (University of Florence, Italy)Speaker Ilaria Moschini, University of Florence, Italy. The talk stems out of my research on the hybridization of US political and institutional discourse with the language of the web (e.g. Moschini 2016, 2017), where I have underlined how the exploration of the ideological load of the context of use (which is never neutral) is crucial to fully ‘unpack’ the realization of meaning in “webridized” discourses. Digitally mediated textualities appear to be shaped – along with the discursive practices favored by the digital platforms or by the communities of use – by the values encoded in such platforms. And those values are not only the ones related to the globalization of markets (Fairclough 2011), but also the ones related to the aesthetics and to the worldviews of the people who designed them (Coleman 2013).
Through a selection of examples, the talk will critically argue for the necessity of combining the multimodal exploration of how meaning is created with the investigation of the governing philosophies of the “Discourse Systems” (Scollon, Wong Scollon & Jones, 2012 [1995]), that is the worldviews which underpin digital platforms. Indeed, personal computers, the Internet and social media are cultural artifacts that originate out of a peculiar historical blending of US liberal culture, DIY ethos and Sci-Fi Fan Culture (Isaacson 2014; Turner 2006) and that still present deep traces of such an ideational architecture. All welcome