Multimodality in pawssing

This is just a brief sketch on what we can do with a blog post like the news item shared on Cole and Marmalade’s page: Baby Black Kitten Mews in Distress and Melts Hearts Everywhere. The story on the black kitten is an example for multimodality. We’ll just go into multimodality in passing, and not in full detail.

Multimodality in computer-mediated communication/computer-mediated discourse means that we communicate via various semiotic modes, like text, visual elements, and audio elements. We can also choose between the modes that technology allows us to, these are the technical modes, then.

So what do we have here? Most striking probably are the visuals: the two images of the black kitten and the pop-up with Cole and Marmalade. Cats simply attract, they are cute, and kittens are even cuter. We also have visual elements in the social icons of the social media platforms.

Then we have audio when we click on the link to the video because we can hear the kitten meowing and making sweet noises when she finally has something to eat.

And we have textual elements: the text has quite a few meowlogisms in it: ‘wants to send you mews notifiCATions’, ‘not right meow’, ‘yes, purrlease’, ‘cat-egories’, and ‘paw the one you want’.

A textual-visual element is the link itself. The blue and underlined script indicates the link, which is a common indicator we have long got used to.

Multimodality offers us a broad range of possibilities for all sorts of things to analyse: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, semiotics, semantics, morphology, lexicology, and lots more. And cats make the whole endeavour much more fun.

Cole and Marmalade’s site is here: Home – Cole & Marmalade (coleandmarmalade.com)