Much of our communication involves combining different modes at once, like written text and images, or spoken words and gestures. How do we integrate them? What effect does the medium or the genre that we are using have on how we formulate our messages?
Communicating using a variety of modes or methods
Some think of multimodal communication as something modern—as combining text and videos on websites, or as both hearing and seeing people when we communicate using apps on our smartphones. But it simply means communicating using a variety of modes or methods.
Face to face
Even a simple face-to-face interaction usually combines the modes of speech and gesture. Humans have been engaging in multimodal communication since prehistoric times, using sounds in combination with visible actions. And despite the fast pace of digital technology development, we still play videos largely on the same real-time scale as that of face-to-face interaction—the human time scale.
Multimodal Communication is one of the tracks of the Master's degree programme in Communication and Information Studies (CIS). The track is taught in English and welcomes students from abroad as well as those from the Netherlands.
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