ABSTRACT
The three chapters in the section offer an exciting and thoughtful reflection on the changing developments in image-centric practices and how they shape the relative status of image and language. As Caple notes, scholars working with the visual will agree with the essential incommensurability of image and language and the significance of the need to understand the ways in which images and words “enter into relations with one another”. The chapters explore how these relations unfold across the use of a range of social media in new and different ways, which, as Zappavigna argues, are “increasingly embedding images and other visual media into their texts”. Emojis – perhaps the ultimate form of image-centric practice, are, Siever and Siever argue, “not only image-centric due to their pictorial nature, but also due to their text-structuring (in relation to verbal syntax and layout) and coherence-conducive functions”.
