Multimodality (three concepts) and "This American Life"

After being on the air for ten years, This American Life, a documentary radio program on National Public Radio hosted by Ira Glass, exemplifies, for me, what a multimodal text is. Although I am not sure, whether or not, the program’s producers are aware of their use of multimodal concepts. As an artifact, This American Life is ripe for further examination. Three essential concepts discussed herein that are wedded to the program’s design, production and success, are those of lifeworlds, provenance and experiential meaning potential.
The New London Group, along with Mary Cope and Bill Kalantzis, in “A Pedagogy for Multiliteracies,” developed the concept of lifeworlds to describe how migrating social spheres, or discursive communities, overlap and rely on shared communication methods, deeming what type of semiosis is valuable. As I listened to the compilation, “New Beginnings: Ten Years of this American Life,” I recognized the varying discursive fields, first posited by Bordeaux, that work collaboratively to help define what it is to be an American. Each micronarrative, which is contextualized within its associated lifeworlds, places the listener into a very specific context – that of the subject. Each micronarrative, or mini-documentary, is part of the larger program narrative, and the collective of programs are part of an even larger and ongoing discussion of what it means to be an American. Additionally, the program relies heavily on the migration of social spheres, not only between those specific communities highlighted within each story, but also into the larger, diverse metanarrative1 of the United States of America.
Further analysis of “New Beginnings: Ten Years of this American Life,” enabled me to tease out additional multimodal concepts. Foundationally, the principles of provenance and experiential meaning potential are dependent upon psychological recollection cues, but each works in a very different way. Provenance is the beforehand knowledge of a mode, a medium, or a production technique. Essentially, a signifier, often with deeper social meanings, is imported from another place, another time, another culture, or another social group. When the signifier is utilized by an editor, as in this example, it can cue up a memory within the listener, as well as all the things one might associate with that memory.
When a program, such as This American Life imbeds a sound effect like a work whistle into its portrayal about blue-collar autoworkers, it is very possible that the listener may associate the sound with union work movements, or perhaps social unrest from outside of their immediate contexts. The object, in this case, a sound often associated with the shift changes at factories, is grounded in history, with a cultural and social idea of what the object signifies. Where one user might correlate the sound with the oppressive condition found in large industrial factories, conditions highlighted in the film depictions of Orwell’s 1984, or Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemki,. Another listener might proudly associate the sound of a work whistle with many years of unionized labor. It really is dependent on what memories are recalled when the listeners first hears an imbedded sound.
Another multimodal principle found in This American Life, is experiential meaning potential. Where provenance might use a sound to incorporate connotation and significance, as highlighted herein with the work whistle example, experiential meaning potential is specific to the use of cultural memory that one attaches to specific mode. A piece that I recently heard on This American Life, which layers djembe beats behind Latino signing from South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, relies heavily on a listeners ability to make connections between the incorporation of African drumming, as a mode, into Tejano music. The sounds, like the utterance of a word, will have a contextualized history that is known only to the individual listener, making each listener-experience unique. It is the uniqueness of the listener-experience, when compared to the forced visual representations provided by television and other primarily visual mediums that make This American Life such a distinctive user experience.
Although many more multimodal elements can be found being utilized for the design, production and dissemination of This America Life, the three highlighted herein are good examples why the program has had such success. The stories found in each program, highlight deeply personal experiences that the listener must associate with, in order for the program’s success. Each time the listener recognizes a sound, mode, or description of a lifeworld from their own uniquely personal experiences, the potential for catharsis increases greatly. It is the catharsis that comes from individual recognition, something often overlooked when artifacts are examined through a multimodal lens that makes This American Life, an increasingly accessible listener experience.


Works Cited
Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routlegde, 2000.

Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Oxford University Press, 2003.

This American Life: National Public Radio, 2005. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Archive.aspx?year=2005