Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

As explained in the Introduction chapter, I consider the user-driven development of Second Life as
a ‘socio-technical’ phenomenon (Liewrouw 2006). Within this framework, not only tools and their
affordances are important but also the individual and social forces that shape the sign-production
(and meaning-making) activities; as they too have a role in determining the collective actions of
designers and how they constantly constitute the technology as ‘in-the-making’. Research studies
on collaborative new media environments should also consider both the affordances (and
constraints) of the media and the new social patterns of collaborative design and user-driven
innovation that are emerging from within the communities of users of these technologies (Deacon
et al. 2007). Therefore, I suggest that combining multimodal analysis with the MDA perspective
offers a promising methodological ground, through which I intend to study both textual and social
dimensions of place-making.
Combining the semiotic analysis with observation of actors, places and practices
Multimodal analysis provides a systemic functional framework (of semiotic units and metafunctions)
to analyze how meaning potentials are constructed through multimodal organization of
socially available semiotic resources. It places the semiotic assemblages (texts or objects) to the
center of analysis to uncover how modes refer to concepts (or conceptual categories) through
interpretation. In multimodal analysis, it is important to focus on how the semiotic choices of signmakers
generate experiential interpersonal and textual coherences and provide affordances or
constraints for meaning-making. It considers –but not deliberately studies – the socio-cultural
contexts in which signs are produced.
Semiotics takes as its priority the study of the features of the text itself: what it represents and
how (…). Semiotics does not exclude the facts about the artist's life and social milieu and
economic circumstances and psychological makeup, or the broader social, political, and
cultural history of his (or her!) period, but leaves them for later consideration when their
relevance has been proven by aspects of the text itself. (O’ Toole 1994: 129)
Modes are analyzed as semiotic units with a “hypertextual” view, which emphasizes the complexity
of multimodal arrangements and the dynamic relations between modes. Therefore, it is possible to
frame to purpose of multimodal analysis as uncovering the nexus of meaning potentials within the
text.
However, such an interpretative framework also has ramifications, as it may lead the analyst to
assume that the semiotic functions are just ‘there’, waiting to be found within the text itself. This
would certainly contradict a fundamental principle of meaning-making social semiotic theory,
since “there is no such thing as an 'essential meaning' (…) but rather a potential range of meanings
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