Multimodality — Is Instagram becoming our modern day fairytale book?
In today’s post I will be analysing what the term ‘multimodality’ is and how I used this when creating my own Instagram stories.
Multimodality is a theory which looks at the many different modes that people use to communicate with each other and express themselves. It can be easily defined as a means of communication with the use of visual and textual sources to compose a message. A semiotic theorist Gunther Kress who coined the theory defined the two elements of multimodality — medium and mode.
Everyone who uses and engages with social media uses multimodality without even realising. This blog will be focusing on how important multimodality is when using social media, namely instagram, as a platform that journalists use to convey their messages and story to their audience. I will be exploring how and why we understand their messages.
Before I begin to depict the significance of multimodality in journalism and social media, it is important we understand how Kress defined multimodality:
Mode — is a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning. The different examples of mode are Image, writing, layout, speech, moving images.
Medium — is a substance in which meaning is realised and through which it becomes available to others. Mediums include video, image, text and audio.
Multimodality on Instagram
Kress’ work taught me to pay close attention to the medium I am using to communicate my messages which is Instagram. My experience of multimodality extended to creating Instagram stories that are informative while being aesthetically appealing to capture viewers and boost engagement. I used the website Canva — it provides several templates with designs for ease of users and to speed up the process of creating your own. Canva also has the exact measurements needed to fit pictures, stories or videos for Instagram dimensions. This is extremely helpful, time saving and the frustration that comes with uploading stories when your phone crops out information.
I decided to use stories on Instagram as a mode of storytelling because social media has become a dominant platform where consumers learn breaking news and keep up with current affairs. Vox published data revealing that Instagram sees 500 million daily active users, who upload 250 million stories each day. Users spent an average of 53 minutes per day on Instagram.
Below are examples of each story I created:
Looking at the instagram stories I created. This was to share my research on BBC being the trusted news source in the UK, they both have visuals, symbols and minimal text. It is important to note that Instagram stories do not have a bulk of unnecessary amount of text, it can impact the engagement between you and the audience. Every image should be informative or eye-catching — or both writes Caroline Scott. It is important to master the hashtag, in one study it found that posts with at least one ‘#’ have 12.6% more engagement. Multimodality is essential and critical for a successful story. I also incorporated Instagram story features, using polls to increase engagement with my audience and to interact with them.
