“You should've seen Luke!” or the multimodal encoding/decoding of the language of postmodern ‘webridized’ TV series
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Ilaria Moschini is a researcher of English language at the University of Florence. Her main interests include US culture, political language, and media textualities. She has published several essays on the linguistic/semiotic analysis of texts from different discourse areas (politics, media, advertising) and a volume on the evolution of the American imaginary.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate the postmodern multimodal language of some contemporary American TV series and its gradual hybridization with the language (and practices) of social media. The paper begins with the analysis of popular television texts that have experimented with visual/musical/narrative form in order to outline the main characteristics of their meaning-making processes. Then, it will explore the concept of “expanded transmediality” according to which audiences participate in the co-construction of narratives (Stein and Busse 2012) to highlight the top-down/bottom-up ongoing exchange in franchise storytelling and it will focus on the textual features of some fan-generated artifacts that enter into these global narrations and where fans exploit postmodern diegetic and editing forms. Finally, the paper will return to the analysis of television to investigate how the on-screen emergence of social media networks has influenced postmodern TV series in terms of their semantic and semiotic realization and/or fruition processes, giving rise to a ‘webridization’ of postmodern television textuality.
About the author
Ilaria Moschini is a researcher of English language at the University of Florence. Her main interests include US culture, political language, and media textualities. She has published several essays on the linguistic/semiotic analysis of texts from different discourse areas (politics, media, advertising) and a volume on the evolution of the American imaginary.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: multimodality, meaning making, and the issue of “text”
- “Why did dinosaurs evolve from water?”: (in)coherent relatedness in YouTube video interaction
- Migrating literacies: multimodal texts and digitally enabled text making
- “You should've seen Luke!” or the multimodal encoding/decoding of the language of postmodern ‘webridized’ TV series
- “The mood is in the shot”: the challenge of moving-image texts to multimodality
- Through the looking glass: a social semiotic and linguistic perspective on the study of video chats
- Semiotic technology and practice: a multimodal social semiotic approach to PowerPoint
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: multimodality, meaning making, and the issue of “text”
- “Why did dinosaurs evolve from water?”: (in)coherent relatedness in YouTube video interaction
- Migrating literacies: multimodal texts and digitally enabled text making
- “You should've seen Luke!” or the multimodal encoding/decoding of the language of postmodern ‘webridized’ TV series
- “The mood is in the shot”: the challenge of moving-image texts to multimodality
- Through the looking glass: a social semiotic and linguistic perspective on the study of video chats
- Semiotic technology and practice: a multimodal social semiotic approach to PowerPoint
