Multimodal McCloud...

Here's another attempt at getting this blog posted now that I'm back in the states! (As if I don't have enough trouble trying to figure this blogging thing out in my OWN country!)

Greetings from Grand Cayman!

“Multimodal” simply means to have more than one mode. In context, “multimodal” refers to the many different ways in which our society is communicating. I absolutely encounter multimodal communication in my everyday life. I am raising two small boys right now, and the perfect example arose the other day when I was teaching the word “soft”. I was referring to our cat, and so I used long, broad strokes as I pet the cat, and changed my voice to a “soft” quality as I repeated the word soft over and over as I helped the boys feel what I meant by having them pet the cat. Likewise right here on the cruise ship most of the crew is from different countries all over the world, and in foreign ports we all use hand gestures, common words, and vocal expression to communicate with each other.

Is McCloud’s text multimodal? That’s kind of hard for me to answer definitively. Certainly it is linguistic, visual, and spatial. Is it actually gestural or audio though? I can argue either way. Really it is only ink on paper, and not making actual gestures or sounds. But it conveys gestures and sounds in a way that our brains process them as if we really were hearing or seeing them, and if we are experiencing the gestures and sounds in the same way, isn’t it about the same?