Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

and-paste logic of online media, the horizontal power relations in participatory cultures and usergenerated
content (Kress 2010).On the other hand, the multimodal perspective needs new
dimensions and further clarifications when the subject of inquiry is a VW.
Multimodality and the virtual worlds
As I emphasize throughout this dissertation, my research focuses on co-design of virtual places and
artifacts in SL. SL has been defined as a ‘virtual world’ which is inhabited by many ‘residents’ via
their ‘avatars’ by many of its users, its creator Linden Lab, and by several researchers,. None of
these definitions are semiotically neutral; they are loaded with negotiations and discourses on the
conditions of virtuality, spatiality and interactivity. But a fundamental question of what makes such
a platform ‘virtual’ is yet to be answered, as the social interactions and co-production activities
actually do take place in temporal and spatial dimensions. As I will explain in further detail in
Chapters 7 and 8, the reflections of the co-designers on their semiotic associations with coproduction
of virtual places and artifacts rely substantively on their conceptualizations of the VW
itself, and what makes SL so different than the so-called ‘real-life (RL)’. Therefore, in this section I
will discuss the condition of being virtual (in contrast to real or actual). My aim here is to bridge
the social semiotic framework to the following section on the notion of place as an experiential and
a social context for semiotic events (in contrast to space as an abstract mathematical description).
Social definitions of the real versus the virtual, and social construction of their meanings, have
always been of central importance to the semiotic understanding of space and place 6 . An important
one of semiotic associations include signs of realism, and the necessary “semiotic navigational
devices for the viewer” (Kress 2010: 106) to arrange multimodal clues in a meaningful experience.
According to Hodge and Kress (1988: 121), “contending parties seek to impose their own definition
of what will count as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, as a decisive moment in the battle for social control.”
Making of signs both requires and transforms the semiotic resources of the culture in which
communication takes place. Social semiotics consider these personal accounts of truth and reality
as integral parts of the process of semiosis; as contesting discourses they represent conflict and
negotiation in power relations.
While the domain of the virtual is concerned with representations, the actual refers to the
ontological process of becoming rather than the text itself. In his introduction to the edited volume
on Gilles Deleuze’s views on science and philosophy, entitled ‘The force of the virtual’, Peter
Gaffney (2010) describes a constructivist agenda for the definitions of the actual and virtual that is
6
For detailed discussions of social construction of discourses on reality, see also Berger and Luckmann (1966) and Lakoff
and Johnson’s (1980) seminal work on cultural metaphors; as well as Iedema (2003) for reflection of the social
constructivist frame on social semiotic theory.
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