ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolving role of subtitling in the media landscape, charting the gradual emancipation of this modality of translation from the dictates of the film industry as it comes to serve the more democratic forms of media “prosumption” associated with digital culture. Kress and van Leeuwen’s distinction between “recording” and “synthesising technologies” provides the conceptual network required to trace the shift from an “ontology of referentiality,” based on the hegemonic narrational regime, to the “ontology of deconstruction” that lies at the heart of the digital media ecology, moulded by variable degrees of convergence between industrial and amateur practices. Developments in the digital arena, as instantiated by Chinese danmu, are presented as contemporary instances of “representation-as-design” driven by rhetorical choices and analysed in terms of the affordances of “semiotic software” and the social semiotic practices that the latter enables. This study shows how, where ordinary rhetors have gained greater visibility and agency, their performance of citizenship involves the deconstruction of representation by exposing the cultural and social make-up of multimodal ensembles.
