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Part of
Engagement in Professional Genres
Edited by Carmen Sancho Guinda
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 301] 2019
► pp. 243–258

Chapter 13
Scifotainment

Evolving multimodal engagement in online science news

| Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, People’s Republic of China

This article adopts a multi-analytical perspective to examine engagement in an evolving science communication website. The website has evolved to engage readers from a “verbal nucleus” inherited from traditional news to a “hypermodal nucleus” that caters to the information consumption style of social media, and further to a “scifopost” that integrates social media post into the design. The evolution is driven by the shift from a “deficit model” to a “democracy model” in science communication and a larger cultural shift in the nature of knowledge creation and transmission. Furthermore, the more malleable multimodal resources as compared with verbal resources spearhead the shift from channels for science information to entertainment and engagement, which in turn triggers a similar shift of functions in verbal resources.

Keywords: engagement, online science news, social media, deficit model, democracy model, multimodality, design, social semiotics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, genre
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Engagement in online science news
  • 3.Data: The evolving news page of Futurity
  • 4.Theory and methods
  • 5.Multimodal engagement in the evolving news pages
    • 5.12009 version: Voice of authority as dominant engagement resource
    • 5.22010 version: Media affordances as engagement device
    • 5.32013 version: Social media practices as engagement scheme
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.13zha
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