Blog Post 7

It is believed that multimodality can be explained by breaking it down into 3 parts. The firsts being that multimodality is made up from modes that work together to give things a meaning. The second part of multimodality is that certain societies develop meaning for certain things over time. The examples we talked about in class were “tweet” and “safari.” While 30 years ago if you were to ask any American what the word “tweet” meant they were most likely to say it is the noise a bird makes. And a “safari” was an excursion into the wilderness to observe wildlife. Even googling the word “safari” today, the entire first page of results is about the web browser Safari, how it started and how to download it onto your home desktop. Over time, with the changes in society and development of technology, the meaning of these words have taken a complete 360 turn. The third part of multimodality is “people orchestrate meaning through their selection and configuration of modes, foregrounding the significance of the interaction between modes.” If I was asked to create my own definition of genre I would say it’s a way to classify different types of material, most commonly being books, music, and movies. Hodge and Kress define genres as “typical forms of texts which link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and occasion', adding that they 'control the behavior of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential consumers.” I think the main relationship between multimodality and genre is that they are both types of categorization. Neale says that with genre, people build up expectations of what should fit into a specific genre. People have the same meaning and expectations for what types of books they would find in a section titled “romance.”  This is the same as multimodality in that people have an insight or “previous knowledge” of what is to be associated with certain modes. I would say multimodality is a more specific type of genre, because it breaks meaning down into founding components.