Multimodality describes an anthropology across multiple media platforms--an anthropology that traverses film, photograph, theater, design, podcast, app and game (to name a few) as well as conventional modes of print representation. But multimodality is a restless, protean concept, one that has already exploded its initial demarcation (modes of dissemination) into a spectrum of engagements. Multimodality is about the platforms we use as we produce our work (social media, blogs, websites), and the social media that ripples out from it as people share, comment, re-mix and appropriate. Finally, multimodality is the acknowledgement that people are engaged in anthropologies of their own lives, and that these productions (YouTube videos, Instagram photos) are worthwhile of attention as ethnographically intended media in their own rights. By multimodality, then, we re-cognize anthropology along 2 complementary axes--a horizontal one that links together phases of eth...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.