Hvorfor og hvordan ’betyder’ nethandel? Om blandingen af teksttyper i Zalandos netbutik [Why and how does online shopping ’mean’? On the mixing of textual types in Zalando’s web shops]

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v34i64.25012

Abstract

Shopping is one of the many everyday activities that are increasingly digitally remediated. This not only transforms the high streets of our villages and towns, but also the way customers and retailers interact, the way retailers present goods to customers, the way customers can examine goods, and the perceived and real risks customers are exposed to. Goods that can be touched and handled in markets and brick-&-mortar shops must now be inspected and selected by means of words and images, which presupposes linguistic and visual literacies. This article centres on an analysis of Zalando’s use of multimodal resources, and it shows how different registers intertwine. Also, it points to an increasing importance of language and it suggests that online shopping may in fact be less multimodal than face to face shopping, requiring linguistic skills and literacies not everyone possesses. The text analysis is related to findings from eye-tracking research and to findings from marketing studies, and thus bridges between different approaches to the study of online shopping.

Author Biographies

Thomas Hestbæk Andersen, University of Southern Denmark

Thomas Hestbæk Andersen is Associate Professor of Business Communication at the University of Southern Denmark and director of its Centre for Multimodal Communication. His research focuses on social semiotic text analysis and text production, viz. research on the digital resemiotisation of interaction in/from organizations, multimodal copy writing, multimodal discourse analysis, and (as basic research) a systemic functional description of the grammar and semantics of Danish. His most recent books are Teksten i grammatikken (a Danish functional grammar; with Alexandra Holsting) and Social Semiotics. Key Figures, New Directions. He is founder and chair of the Nordic Association for SFL/social semiotics.

Theo van Leeuwen, Syddansk Universitet

Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Honorary Professor at the University of Lancaster and the University of New South Wales. He has published widely on critical discourse analysis, multimodality, social semiotics and visual communication. His books include Reading Images -The Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress); Multimodal Discourse (with Gunther Kress) Introducing Social Semiotics; Speech, Music, Sound; Global Media Discourse (with David Machin), The Language of Colour and Discourse and Practice. He is a founding editor of the journal Visual Communication

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Published

2018-06-14

How to Cite

Andersen, T. H., & van Leeuwen, T. (2018). Hvorfor og hvordan ’betyder’ nethandel? Om blandingen af teksttyper i Zalandos netbutik [Why and how does online shopping ’mean’? On the mixing of textual types in Zalando’s web shops]. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 34(64), 27 p. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v34i64.25012