Multimodality And Social Semiotics

(a) Background of research

The proposed research draws on the growing body of work in the recent field of multimodality and social semiotics, particularly in digital environments, with a focus on South Asian diasporic websites as representations and expressions of cultural identities. The proposed study stems from the PI’s background in new technologies of learning and her forthcoming co-authored textbook on discourses in the contemporary digital age.

Multimodality in online spaces

In the context of the social changes in the contemporary, global, and networked society (Castells, 2000), new media technologies have brought about a re-orientation of communication possibilities for representation and meaning. With the expanding reach of the

Research on multimodal aspects of websites has been carried out on various types of web spaces such as digital learning resources (O’ Halloran, 2005; Kress and Bezemer, 2008), personal profiles of social networking sites (Jones, 2012), and food blogs (Domingo, Jewitt, and Kress, 2014). The multimodal nature of these studies focusses on aspects such organization of modes, inter-semiotic relations, social and technological functions, and to an extent, social identities. However, the articulation of cultural identities through multimodal means of the websites is an area, yet to be explored within the context of community websites. Since technology has largely come to be acknowledged as what people make of it in a cultural context (Pauwels, 2005), the expression of cultural identities in the realm of diasporic communities becomes significant. Online spaces of diasporic websites in particular, have become sites for configuration and shaping of meaning-making resources through the communities’ situated choices. As a result, digital representations and cultural meaning-making in online spaces and their social implications within a context, become central

At the same time, the politics of representation in mainstream media, continued with its persistence of a patterned portrayal of cultural stereotypes of diasporic communities despite their historical presence and contribution in a region’s development (Erni and Leung, 2014). Nevertheless, with new forms of electronic mediation, diasporas have begun to change through their exploration of the immense potential of the internet. The social implication of transnational flows has given rise to a distinct form of ‘globalization-from-below’ (Brecher, Costello and Smith, 2000). As a result, myriad economic and cultural activities of diasporic communities, which are neither government-based nor corporate-based, have begun to emerge in light of the new media technologies such as, the internet. Among diasporic ‘mediascapes’ (Karim, 2003), the emergence and rapid proliferation of diasporic websites can be viewed as an attempt to negotiate and represent meanings and cultures of a non-dominant community, significant to the construction of identities. To understand this construction, both traditional and contemporary notions on diasporic identities can be mapped onto the Hall’s (1990) views of cultural identities. On the one