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Abstract
In the contemporary social media communication landscape, there has been an increasing trend towards multimodal communication, where meaning is constructed through the interaction of linguistic, visual, graphic, and interactive resources. Among social network communication tools, Instagram stands out as a multimodal communication platform that emphasizes the visual, but also incorporates linguistic, graphic, and interactive elements. This study examines the role of multimodal elements in Instagram communication and how their interaction constructs meaning and engages users. The current study is informed by a qualitative multimodal discourse analysis approach, which is carried out on a corpus of Instagram texts that are purposively selected from publicly available data. The study examines the interplay between the verbal mode, which consists of the image captions and hashtags, the visual mode, which consists of the images and videos, the graphic mode, which consists of the use of emojis and layouts, and the interactive mode, which consists of the use of likes and comments. The study found that the visual mode is the main mode that attracts the audience’s attention, followed by the image captions. Emojis and hashtags are also very important in the text and are crucial in the pragmatic and discursive construction of the text. Interactive elements are also crucial in the construction of the text.
References
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