ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors read two excerpts about multimodality. In the first, discourse analysts David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen discuss the use of stock images in media texts. They talk about the kinds of visual features associated with these images, explore their role in the emergence of a kind of ‘global visual language’, and show that this ‘language’ is not ‘neutral’, but promotes particular ideologies. In the second excerpt, media sociolinguist Astrid Esslin discusses the kinds of modes that are likely to be important in media communication in the future, in particular, modes associated with touch, smell, and taste. A key characteristic of the vast majority of Getty images is that the background is either out of focus or eliminated altogether—many of the images are made in the studio, against a flat background. By means of such decontextualisation, a photograph is more easily inserted into different contexts and acquires a ‘conceptual’ feel.
