The material of media: a view from multimodal semiotics

‘Media’ and ‘medium’ are established key constructs for many kinds of engagements with communication, both linguistic and otherwise. And yet, a host of unresolved issues remain concerning the most effective ways to conceptualise just what ‘medial’ contributions are and how they may relate to other aspects of communication. Discussions of medium tend to span from treatments of the consequences of the diverse material substrates of communication on the one hand (‘medium as carrier’ or ‘in-between’), through to complex and dynamic institutional practices on the other (‘media as social institutions’). This cannot but leave a somewhat confused picture. In this position paper, I illustrate the role of medium within our own work on multimodal semiotics, engaging specifically with the media linguistic discussions of media and multimodality pursued in an earlier paper in jfml by Luginbühl/Schneider (2020). Within our multimodality account, the theoretical and descriptive work found most beneficial for analysis has pulled our characterisations of materiality and of media in quite different directions, opening up more theoretical space for nuanced description. I present this position briefly and then consider both how it relates to approaches to mediality more generally and how it might contribute useful complementary methods of analysis, particularly when engaging with medially complex multimodal situations.