Multimodality in storytelling: Considerations for Instagram stories.
How do you frame small snippets of facts to deliver a big message?
This blog will focus on my take aways from the task of “storytelling” via creating Instagram stories. These displayed some facts and figures that I had researched for my other blogs, namely on The Fourth Estate. The posts are designed to try and persuade viewers to register to vote — they were created before the cut off point for Thursday’s General Election — using facts and figures from past referendums, social media user statistics and voter statistics. I was trying to craft the narrative that it is imperative for people sign up to vote so that we hear as many political voices as we can. How effective these posts become, I found, is based on the utilisation of several aspects of multimodality. So, what is multimodality? Firstly, it can be split into two terms: medium and mode.
Gunther Kress, a late semiotic lecturer at UCL, defined the two constituents of multimodality — medium and mode as:
Mode — is a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning. Image, writing, layout, speech, moving images are examples of different mode. — Gunther Kress
Medium — is the substance in which meaning is realised and through which it becomes available to others. Mediums include video, image, text, audio, etc — Gunther Kress.
So, in its purest form, multimodality refers to practices of communication with regards to textual, linguistic, visual and spatial variation — modes. The use of these modes create media through which a single artefact can be created.
I read a few of Gunther Kress’s works to aid me with my tasks. I appreciate his more academic work is probably outside of the interest of a lot of readers! However, if any of you do want to read some more or find this topic at all interesting, I have given the references for some of his work at the bottom for you!
His work taught me to pay close attention to the medium through which I sought to mediate my messages — Instagram. In truth, the form of medium need only be online to be subject to Kress’ considerations, but Instagram is an apt example of this new, online medium. Kress argued that sign interpretation varied — and excelled — when the medium through which any message was projected, was supplemented by a complimentary second medium running in conjunction. He wrote,
“This is due to it drawing a viewer’s attention to “both the originating site and the site of recontextualisation” — Gunther Kress
This helped me to adapt my first Instagram story such that it was more effective at delivering its message.
I used Crello to create the frameworks for each story, and illustrated these frameworks with elements of modes specific to social medias — be it countdowns (Instagram), hashtags (Twitter) or links.
Example 1
As I created several draft runs of the post to the left, I started to learn a few things about the efficacy of such posts. Firstly, if we take writing as the salient mode in this post — since people read top to bottom — we can analyse the positioning of the writing and its grammatical and lexical variation as per the modal resources of that mode. Grammatically, I learned that capital, bold letters are always more striking with regards to statement pieces such as my example. I was trying to instil a serious message inside of the reader, and I felt that the capital letters helped with the efficacy of this motive.
Lexically, I struggled at first to find a balance between including enough words such that my point was amply mediated, yet keeping my post succinct enough such that the “impact” of the post was not lost on a reader having to wade through mountains of words. I also feel, after considered analysis, that representation of the 2016 Referendum numbers as numbers rather than percentages is more effective at illustrating the scale. Initially, I created a pie chart in which each segment was split into its relevant percentage, but I found that this lacked the impact that I hoped to achieve. After all, 20/30 and 20000/30000 are the same percentage, but when your point revolves around the quantity of a in a/b, representing the second example as a number illustrates this quantity. This was a conclusion I only reached after starting my posting endeavours.
As per Kress’ quote, I tried to juxtapose colour, size and positioning as three mediums that would all push the same narrative — the semiotic importance of phrases that contained unique features with regards to these three modes. For example, the main three points were the number of Instagram users, the platform these numbers represented and the “moral of the post” — to ensure a higher voting number. All three of these points are illustrated in larger writing, striking colour and are isolated laterally such that no other words flank them that may detract from their impact. These graphical resource considerations were supplemented by a largely black background (link to original photographer here) with a light beam that shone only on one segment of the three, the “moral of the post”. These considerations were factored in upon reading works on multimodality, and represent some of the artistic tactics and characteristics one can use when trying to create an effective story.
Finally, I paid attention to the chronology of the post with regards to what would be read first. The pie chart is centred, the spacing indicative of its importance, and the link at the bottom is the final thing that the viewer will see, hopefully increasing their likelihood of clicking it. I played around with this spacing, since it is so important to the reading of the post, but I learned through research (Kress) and reading that the part of the post which you hope the reader will interact with — perhaps the salient part of the entire post — should always conclude it, which is more akin to an academic essay and less like the Inverted Pyramid that I grew accustomed to using within my journalistic work. Again, this is something that I found out through trial and error, research and reading.
If I had to give a tip to a would be Instagram poster, it would be that if you are trying to illicit a reaction from the reader, position the action you hope to illicit after the causality (the reason they should act). This is generally at the bottom of the page, and seems an effective way to craft your storytelling. If the rest of your wordings are enticing enough, the viewer will reach the bottom. This does, however, illustrate the importance of a catchy opening line. I found it remarkably difficult to craft this opening line, and eventually settled with “focus…here”, as I felt the command would possibly have more pull with a reader than an adverb such as “please”.
Example 2
My second example was created in the same vain as the first, using slightly different statistics to try to create a slightly different narrative.
I again used the theories I had learned with regards to the chronological reading of the post, positioning the “Important” banner at the top. My narrative this time was not to illustrate to the viewer how many people did not vote, instead to point out how many people actually have registered to vote, hopefully implying the urgency. In sales we would call this “testimonial persuasion”, since it is relying on the fact that the reader will acknowledge the value of their peers engaging in a topic.
Because of the narrative shift, I realised that I would have to alter the visual mode of the post.
Where previously the isolation of the post’s important aspects mediated a particular message, here I sought to do the opposite, hence the use of 4 “Are you [ready]?” bubbles, as well as the footer image of anonymous peers waving “Vote” flags. I read in Kress’ work that,
“The literacy of the emerging generation changed, becoming accustomed to text circulated in pieces, informally, and across multiple mediums of image, colour, and sound. The change represented a fundamental shift in how writing was presented: from print-based to screen-based” — Gunther Kress
I tried to apply this notion of multiple mediums to the second post, using facts and figures to illustrate my point as always, juxtaposing this with the “push” at the bottom end of the post to enforce the message. I chose to directly ask the receiver a question that they would have to internally answer, using this to embed the statistics, rather than just displaying statistics alone. This was achieved through forced interaction with the post, irrespective of the countdown and #hashtag which proposed optional interaction (more later). Finally, I displayed the initial information both numerically and as a percentage. The percentage was meant to state, the numerical illustration to enforce.
“a mode is a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning” — Gunther Kress
I tried to use this statement with regards to the hashtag and the countdown. Hashtags have been socially encoded to constitute solidarity to a cause. Their literal purpose is to group together alike posts, so I felt the hashtag #register2vote (this is the one that the parties have been using) would concretely instil the notion of a common cause. Furthermore, the countdown has been socially encoded to constitute urgency. You needn’t look any further than the recent Black Friday sales — countdowns galore were used to try and coerce shoppers into snapping up the latest deals “before they go”. Whilst these are often marketing gimmicks, my cause was genuinely running out of time, and I felt that the countdown added to the urgency. These were all considerations from the academic work of Kress, and things that I learned throughout my experience with the topic.
I do think that Instagram stories are worthwhile mediums for social media storytelling and disseminating information. The creation of these stories was not as straightforward as I first thought it might have been. Whilst it is easy to just slap together a story that shares facts, there is a lot of consideration that has to be put into the post with regards to the use of modes and mediums. Since I felt like Kress’ work was so poignant on the topic — indeed he was one of the best known semioticians in the UK. Remember, the references at the bottom provide an interesting read as there is far more to the crafting of a post than simply selection of what statistics to use.
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— Kress, G. 2003., Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
— Kress, G. 2010., Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge.
