First things first, "multi-modal" vs. "multi-media." Are they the same thing? Personally, I say no. To me, the phrase "multi-media" evokes an image of a text being created using different mediums, like text, pictures, etc, whereas "multi-modal" means that it uses more than one mode, which can be achieved using only one kind of "media." That's my feeling at least.
Now let's get on with these questions:
Linguistic Mode: First off, I notice the use of the word "pray." Though a small thing, I feel like it has a big impact in something like this. It's appealing to the majority Christian populous, kind of affirming their likely course of action. The other key passage to me is the last sentence. Firstly the statement refers to the Japanese as "our friends," which kind of establishes a stance on how much we'll help. I mean, we're much more likely to help out a friend than someone we don't necessarily like. The other thing I notice is the line "as they recover and rebuild." It looks to the future and give s a bit of hope, not using any tentative terms and saying that Japan WILL recover from this disaster.
Visual Mode: From the two twitter profiles, I feel like you can glean the extent to which someone uses twitter, and by extension what they might use it for. The first profile is much more stark, simpler design, and makes me think of a simpler user, who perhaps uses twitter more to just check up on her friends, and occasionally post. The second profile is a little more showy, and seems like a little more time was put into picking it, indicating a person who probably posts a bit more and uses twitter more often. From the profile picture, I feel you can tell how comfortable a person is with their presence online. On both the profiles shown, the profile pic doesn't show the full face, and in some cases no face at all, indicating that both users are at least somewhat uncomfortable with having their full presence online.
Aural Mode: As noted in class, the link is malfunctioning, and I will admit that I am just a tad too tired at the moment to look it up in google -___-;
Spatial Mode: I took a look at the U of I homepage (creative, no?), and I must say, my eye was certainly drawn straight to the large news app in the middle of the page. It takes up most of the screen with an image of the Mars Rover, and is very eye-catching. Personally I find this a rather interesting choice, since I would think it would be a better idea to have the main image of the page be something a little more related to the university itself. Most of the other elements are rather small in comparison to the news app, the actual university links quite small at the bottom of the page, requiring that I scroll down to even see them. As far as understanding, after looking at the page for a while I could see where all the U of I relevant information was, but at first glance it didn't seem terribly related to U of I....
Gestural Mode: I watched a short little "Weekly Address" video, and I don't really know how I feel about Obama's gestural mode. On the one hand, I found his facial expressions to be completely ineffective in portraying any sort of importance in anything he was saying, since it remained very static throughout the entire address. I understand this is a very Obama thing to do, but still. However, he kind of makes up for it with his hand motions. In almost every sentence, he accents words with his hand motions, almost pointing out what parts are most important for us to be paying attention to. Overall, I would say it works more or less effectively, since you are naturally drawn to his hands when he moves them so much, but if that's going to be his primary way of gestural communication, I would suggest they show his hands for more of the address.
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