Multimodal expression in written digital discourse: The case of kineticons

This paper is concerned with the appropriation of the affordances of text-based communication in digital media to evoke associations with multimodal communication, specifically visual, auditory and haptic experiences accompanying observed nonverbal phenomena and actions in text-messages. In order to account for these phenomena, the notion of kineticon is introduced and theorised from the perspective of its constitutive elements, established conventions, and functions. Through the analysis presented here, I identify a user-initiated language development serving to express multimodal meanings within a written medium often simplistically treated as mono-modal. I also demonstrate that the Goffmanian categories of given and given off expression need to be reconsidered in the light of the emergence of the expression of multimodal content in text-based digital media. The paper proposes a methodological approach to the analysis of user-initiated language phenomena, which includes naturally occurring data collection, the use of online participant observations, and detailed interviews using data as prompts.