Multimodal Rhetoric in Online Media Communications

The ZiF Research Group on Multimodal Rhetoric in Online Media Communications investigates how the proliferation of media channels enables political sub-communities to manage and control the creation and dissemination of alternative rhetorical discourses, including advertisements that are personalized according to user profiles and false news stories which have been found to spread faster and more widely than true news stories in platforms such as Twitter.

Given that these discourses are increasingly supplanting traditional consensus-based media frameworks, it is essential to understand the mechanisms through which these discourses operate. This includes the prime sites identified as carriers of these discourses and the multimodal strategies (linguistic, visual, filmic) used for target audiences and the resultant effects. In particular, we will establish the mechanisms of such rhetorical formations with respect to their relationship with mainstream news and the deployment of social media for their amplification and transportation. Particular methods employed will involve the tracking of news articles featured on the homepages of prominent news outlets and responses to those articles across different media platforms (e.g. social media, blogs and other sites).

An integral component of these investigations will be the ideational formulations being supported and resisted in rhetorical formations across mainstream and social media platforms (e.g. nationalism, popularism, humanitarism and racism). The project will highlight key questions of how meanings arising from the integration of language, images and videos can undercut or repoint fragments of discourses grounded in conventional systems of truth and rational argumentation in order to promote more loaded and extremist rhetorical formulations. This is seen as an increasingly critical factor in interpreting and understanding the emergence and proliferation of alternative logics of the social order (social ontologies) and conceptions of justice, morality and social obligations (moral orders) at a time of increased tension, unrest and disillusionment in the West.

Complete description of the project and its members

CoDesign Lab EU. Institute 2022/Multimodality - Minds. Media. Technology.