Blog Post 7

Multimodality in its most basic form is the use of multiple modes together. It is an assumption of communication and social symbolism. Multimodality uses modes such as textual, spatial and visual resources (for a specific reason) to create a specific message. A genre is a grouping or calcification of inventive configuration. A genre is portrayed by using specific modes, with their various functions, to evoke a specific meaning intended to fit the targeted audience. Different modes contribute different elements such as sound, feeling and even smell to keep from making language too general when creating a message for the specific genre.

For my Remediation, as an example portraying the relationship between genre and multimodality, I have decided to create cartoon strips using images from the series to create a comedic dialog between the characters from “How I Met Your Mother” and “Friends”. My intended audience is therefor newspaper and comic strip readers, people who enjoy the comical aspects of a program and “Friends” as well as “How I Met Your Mother” fans. The genre will accordingly be Comedy.

Various modes are used to create a cartoon strip. Textual modes include the texts in the balloons, the captions, font and font size of these words to evoke a certain tone, mood and volume of the speaker. The textual modes are used to humour the reader and provide inside jokes, dialogue and the main story line of the strip. The layout of the strips is very important to draw the readers’ attention and focus the central idea that the medium represented is a cartoon strip. Modes used to create the layout are the intertextual panels, spacing of the words, captions, balloons, images, size of the panels and background. The strips have visual modes such as images of the different characters to entertain and evoke humour. Many more modes are represented in the strip that will be included in my reflection.

These examples of multiple modes were used to create and support the comedic genre. Their various functions contribute to cover all the conventions of a comic strip.