Media as processes of doing and perceiving

Abstract

The paper puts forward an integrated perspective on how meaning emerges in communicative media contexts. We bring together linguistics and film studies to show how semiotic resources interact with their situated media context. To ground our conceptual argument, we bring into dialogue Jan-Georg Schneider’s processual understanding of media as procedures with Sybille Krämer’s media-philosophical view on media and Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropological thinking of human behavior. Using the example of a yoga tutorial that teaches the cross-legged seat, we illustrate that the bodily experiences which are central to adopting the pose are mediated through the interplay of multimodal metaphors and the qualitatively felt staging of the video. As a result, media turn out as processes in which deliberate meaning-making and non-discursive sense-making go hand in hand.