MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS THE CONFLUENCE OF DISCOURSE AND TECHNOLOGY文档.pdfVIP

Multimodal Discourse Analysis as the Confluence of Discourse and Technology R O N S C O L L O N A N D P H I L I P L E V I N E Georgetown University THAT DISCOURSE AND TECHNOLOGY are intimately related is not a new perception. Even the philosopher Nietzsche got in a word on the subject—“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts”—according to Arthur Krystal (2002). Our interest in this volume is not to try to demonstrate that discourse and technology live in a symbiotic relationship. Our interest is in presenting a selected set of papers from the Georgetown University Round Table 2002 (GURT 2002), which opened up a discus- sion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and in related fields about the twofold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how we collect, transcribe, and analyze discourse data, and, possibly more important, the impact on social interactions and discourses themselves that these technologies are having. Discourse analysis as we now know it is in many ways the product of technolog- ical change. At the time of the epoch-making 1981 GURT (Tannen 1982), Deborah Tannen chose as her theme “Analyzing discourse: Text and talk.” Discourse analysis was just then emerging as a subject of linguistic research. The papers in that confer- ence and in that volume were about equally divided between studies of text (dis- course in the form of written or printed language) and talk (discourse in the form of spoken language captured in situ by means of the tape recorder). As Frederick Erickson has noted, small, inexpensive cassette tape recorders made it possible to capture language in use in a way that was prohibitively difficult before the 1960s. He was one of the very few at GURT 1981 who was already using sound film in his research. Now we are seeing the proliferation of communication technologies from palm-sized digital video recorders to c