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Kuso videos as a genre for meaning negotiation and identity contextualization: Toward a social-semiotic multimodal analysis

Kuso videos as an emergent Internet genre have gained its popularity among a great number of online participants, especially via the most popular video-sharing website, Youtube. The present study explores the meaning-making mechanism that operates in the production of kuso videos, which are worthy of note inasmuch as they have been more and more widely used in response to issues arising in Taiwanese society. Different from previous research on monomodal representation of kuso (e.g. written, graphic kuso), the present research takes the previous studies as a point of departure and will analyze a multimodal and multimedial kuso video uploaded onto Youtube. The analysis will center around its performance, power, and meaning potentials and seek to answer the following research questions.
(1) From a multimodal social-semiotic perspective, how are the meaning potentials of kuso videos being performed in the process of meaning-making?
(2) In multimodal kuso videos, what accounts as a mode and what are the affordances of a specific mode? Or, is it necessary to define mode as a separate unit which creates meaning potentials in the whole multimodal production?
(3) In social-semiotic production of kuso videos, who is in control in the process of meaning-making? In other words, in the meaning-making process, how is the identity of kuso video being contextualized and being negotiated with other participants?
(4) How are decontextualization, recontextualization, and identity contextualization interconnected to each other in the production and the distribution of kuso videos?
To analyze the meaning-making process and meaning potentials of the target kuso video, multisemiotic models (Halliday, 1978; Lim, 2002) as well as Bakhtin¡¦s (1981; 1986) genre theory are applied as the basis of the analytical framework while ¡§projective act of identity¡¨ (Coupland, 2007) is used to account for the how identity is contextualized in the video. In addition, the present research proposes the Functional Multisemiotic Model to illustrate with examples how layers of remix operate in the processes of decontextualization, recontextualization, and identity contextualization and to elucidate what semiotic functions they serve at three levels (i.e. ideational, textual, and interpersonal levels). On the whole, this research may shed light on the intricate meaning-making process in multimodal kuso analysis.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0801111-004512
Date01 August 2011
CreatorsChiang, Ro-ning
ContributorsNian-xuan Fang, Ming-yu Tseng, Yu-feng Yang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0801111-004512
Rightsuser_define, Copyright information available at source archive

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