Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign

Multimodal media make meaning by intersecting the semiotic resources of language, visual display, sound and music, cinematic movement, material artifacts, and abstract animation. As meaning-makers, we live across institutions and media and we make meanings that no single medium or institution can control. Transmedia franchises pursue us, colonizing the chronotopes of postmodern life to array the branded content of their media products everywhere we look and go. Social semiotics provides a foundation for critical multimedia analysis that can reach beyond the internal multi-modality of individual works to grasp the social meanings of transmedia franchises and trans-institutional lives. In doing so, I argue that it must re-engage with the larger intellectual project of formulating a political economy of the sign.