ABSTRACT
Digital technologies play a fundamental role in facilitating and disseminating promotional discourse in ever more domains of public and private life, as software "structures and makes possible much of the contemporary world". Semiotic software – in contrast to earlier technologies such as the pen or the typewriter – enables users to select from a range of different semiotic resources, and incorporates and represents knowledge about what constitutes effective use of these resources in particular contexts. This chapter argues that to understand the power of semiotic software people need to adopt a holistic perspective, one that is multimodal and critical, and pays attention to the interaction between software design and use and its relation to broader semiotic and social practices. It focuses on the power of software to intervene in the ways people use language and other semiotic resources. This power rests, first of all, on the ever increasing necessity to use software in all spheres of post-industrial life.
