Metapragmatics of mode-switching: Young people’s awareness of multimodal meaning making in digital interaction

Young people’s social relationships are increasingly established and maintained through digital media. Today’s communicative engagements parallel the continu-ous challenge to deploy a range of semiotic resources that can be arranged in various media platforms for different communicative events. The use of popular applications, such as WhatsApp and Skype, is characterized by varying combinations of speech and/or writing as well as the orchestration of other semiotic resources. The chapter aims to expand the original notion of mode-switching (Sindoni 2013) to empirically focus on these patterns of resources in a data set of Skype video calls between inter-national University students, on the one hand, and a data set of WhatsApp threads between German secondary school students, on the other. Drawing on the concept of media ideology (Gershon 2010a), the study examines the metapragmatic awareness on which these multimodal practices are based as shown in the data. The chapter thus develops an understanding of mode-switching as a communicative practice that is functionally shaped by participants and discusses similarities and differences of such practices between video calls and text messaging data.