Switching Semiotic Styles: The Metachoices of Pandemic Communication

Abstract

This book argues that a reflexive awareness of our semiotic style, our grasp on the world as it rolls over, can be empowering when our normal ways of going on come unstuck, opening up choices that are more event shaping than we realise. Stylistic orientations enact metachoices: choices that set the criteria for subsequent ones, setting up a cascade of conditioned, but not wholly determined, choices. Switching Semiotic Styles constitutes an appeal to broaden our usual repertoire of semiotic practice, channelling a common multimodal listening competence into a perspective interplay which changes the parameters of what can be known. Smith develops a research style constructively opposing the narrative and sonic turns in the social sciences, which he then uses to analyse three examples of communication from the Covid-19 pandemic: advice-giving by the WHO, legal disputes about public health restrictions and vaccine promotion videos. The work shows how individuals and societies arrange ongoingness oriented by both the motivational affordances of transformational goals and the modulating push of music-like patterns of becoming. This book will appeal to scholars interested in semiotics, communication theory, sound studies, organisational communication, health communication, sociology of health and illness, and language in social interaction.