Multimodal dialogue on social media

ABSTRACT

This paper examines digitally mediated multimodal dialogue on social media in relation to intersections between semiotic technology and social communication. In the paper, the theoretical and methodological approach to multimodal social media dialogue explores the interdependence between the design and the use of social media, showing how social media provide pre-designed templates for exchanging of information and how users respond to these technological affordances through dialogic forms. A social semiotic, multimodal approach to dialogue recognizes that dialogue involves not only a functional exchange structure, but also emotive or evaluative correspondence. This paper therefore explores social media: (i) As a functional structure, drawing on theories of exchange structure and genre, and (ii) As realizing evaluative (emotive) correspondence. Based on a corpus of social media dialogues on a number of different platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Viber, Flickr, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter), the paper presents some analysis of the exchange structure and genre in social media dialogues and later emotive online correspondence in relation to “off the shelf” responses and emoticons.

KEYWORDS:

• Multimodal dialogue
• digitally mediated dialogue
• emologue
• social media
• online communication
• semiotic technology
• multimodality

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their comments, which have greatly helped us improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Danica Jovanovic is a Ph.D. Research Fellow at the Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Graduated Professor of Italian Language and Literature, University of Belgrade, and a Master degree holder in Media Education, University of Lapland.

Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales, the Australian Catholic University and the University of Lancaster.

ORCID

Theo Van Leeuwen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2163-8700