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Media as Procedures of Communication
Edited by Martin Luginbühl and Jan Georg Schneider
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 348] 2024
► pp. 156–185

Chapter 7
Media as processes of doing and perceiving

How a yoga pose in an online tutorial takes on meaning as felt sensation

| Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
| Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
The paper puts forward an integrated perspective on how meaning emerges in communicative media contexts. We bring together linguistics and film studies to show how semiotic resources interact with their situated media context. To ground our conceptual argument, we bring into dialogue Jan-Georg Schneider’s processual understanding of media as procedures with Sybille Krämer’s media-philosophical view on media and Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropological thinking of human behavior. Using the example of a yoga tutorial that teaches the cross-legged seat, we illustrate that the bodily experiences which are central to adopting the pose are mediated through the interplay of multimodal metaphors and the qualitatively felt staging of the video. As a result, media turn out as processes in which deliberate meaning-making and non-discursive sense-making go hand in hand.
Keywords: mediality, semiosis, meaning-making, multimodal metaphor, audiovisuals, embodied experience
Article outline
  • 1.The temporal dimension of media
  • 2.Mediality as mode of experience and surplus of sense
  • 3.Analysis: The cross-legged seat as a complex interaction of physical stability and flexibility
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Method
    • 3.3Audio-visual staging of stability, centering and balance
    • 3.4Teaching embodied knowledge
      • 3.4.1Stretching and curvature of the spine
      • 3.4.2Firm base and flexible spine
      • 3.4.3Stable column and flexible lightness
      • 3.4.4Interplay of audiovisual staging and multimodal constitution of meaning
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (63)
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