Digital DIY narratives : a multimodal analysis of discourse genre on Instagram accounts

Abstract

The pervasive presence of online platforms in society constitutes a highly fertile area for the exploration of linguistic phenomena. On visual platforms such as Instagram, users rely on the interconnectedness of image, text, and sound to construct meaning. From a social semiotics perspective, this study explores the multimodal construction of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) discourse. The research was conducted on a corpus of 300 posts from 10 DIY accounts. The visual, aural, and linguistic content of each post was examined applying Martinec and Salway’s framework (2005) to observe text-image relations, coupled with an in-depth analysis of generic features. Said analysis provided a deeper understanding of how modes are employed to construct meaning in DIY discourse. Findings revealed that the visual mode is of paramount importance, rendering text dependent for complete comprehension of content. Furthermore, although DIY discourse is, at its core, procedural, the narrative genre was found intertwined with procedure, arguably due to the nature of social platform use. This work contributes to a broader comprehension of online meaning-making, indicating that the interconnectedness of multimodal devices and platform affordances reshape DIY procedural discourse.