Professor Elise Seip Tønnessen: Meaning-making inbetween modalities and media
Multimodal texts communicate through a broad range of media, and the development of new media has in many ways paved the road for multimodal communication, both in public and private settings. The question posed in this paper is: How do media shape and frame multimodal meaning-making, and what kind of textual practices are facilitated in mass media as well as personal media? The medium as it is understood here includes both the technological conditions and the established practices involved in the use of this technology.
These questions will be discussed through examples that demonstrate how the meaning potentials of the multimodal text is met by the potential for action provided by the medium, and how this can have aesthetic and social consequences and lead to genre development and cultural change.