Welcome to this lecture on digital communication. Now, you may be wondering, what does digital communication have to do with learning English, or what does it even have to do with business communication? Well, in today's globalized world it is increasingly becoming important to be digitally literate. What i mean by that is, you should be able to understand how the internet and social media websites, online tools, mobile tools. How these type of communication tools and technologies have an impact on the language that you use. This is true for any language, not just English. So how you communicate now online, whether it's through a website, or a mobile application, through Skype, through Facebook, through FaceTime, it has an impact on how you use language. So, the purpose of this lesson, is to make you more aware of the impact of digital technologies on language use. And we'll focus a little bit on mainly online communication. Today's world is digital, a lot more people conducting business via the internet. They're making use of mobile phones to conduct business, they are using the internet to provide services, to buy things, e-mails, FaceTimes, conferences online, telecommunication. We are in a digital world. This has been going on now for quite some time, at least a decade or more. So it's increasingly important, both as an employee and employer, that you understand the impact of digital technologies on communication and language. One of the things I want to focus on is this concept of multi-modality. And if you get into digital marketing, for example, you are able to make use of a lot of new tools, from Facebook to Twitter to Google applications In China might be Telabao or Weibo. There are different applications throughout the world nowadays that you can make use of marketing your company. And have a look at this picture right now, and I'll come back to it later in this lecture, but it's quite important in today's world, how do you present information online. So one of the things I want to talk about is what they call multimodality and in today's world to be digitally literate you should be aware of multimodality, and how that works. And what I mean by multimodality is different modes of communication. We present, and we receive information different ways, and through different modes. One mode will be visual, we see things. Another mode might be oral, we hear things. Perhaps we understand things through body language, that's gestural or facial expressions. Spatial information is just as important. How apart is information within a website, for example. And the linguistic, the actual words, the vocabulary, the sentence structures, the grammatical structure. So this is what we mean by multimodality. And if you look at a webpage for example, multimodality becomes increasingly important. And all of these modes will influence your language use and how you understand it. So let's take a look at very briefly an example. I'm going to show you an example of a possible website, and we'll talk a little bit about how different modes of communication could influence each other. Here's the website. xPhone does it again! And you have a picture of a businessman holding his thumbs up, and people in the background are cheering and then below it is a graphic of a person jumping up and I'm assuming these are the profits that are increasing over the year or the four quarters. Below that you have text and a hyperlink, my organization. All of this is influencing each other. The pictures and the graphics immediately give you a positive tone. And the headline with exclamation mark gives you a positive tone. The text itself isn't really saying much it's actually gobbledygook. What I mean by gobbledygook is it's meaningless text. But it's there to present with, to illustrate the point that even before I get to the text, even before I read the words I come to it with a very positive feeling because of the other modes of communication telling me that this is good news. So on a website be aware that modes of communication, that different modes of communication will influence how you interpret the language, and it can create a bias in the actual words, the linguistic mold. Let's go back to that graphic I asked you to take a look at. Digital marketing strategies focus on increasing the real, or sort of the reach in visibility of your business. Well, right away again we have the spatial aspect. We have a lot of white space in the way digital marketing is brought to the forefront because it's a large font. And then you have the icons of very well known social media tools. And if you notice how they're packaged in a sense that is reminiscent of Amazon.com for example, or EPS, some sort of delivery service, it's giving you a particular message that digital marketing can deliver to you promising results. And keywords, strategies focused on increase in the reach and visibility of your business, these are all words that have certain connotation, certain meaning that illustrate the importance of digital market. So I'm just touching on very basics of digital communications and multimodality. But one of the key things that you really do need to be aware of is that in today's world you need to be familiar with how technologies have an impact with the way we use English, or the way we use any kind of language. And how when we use language, that also has an impact with the way you perceive graphics, body language, spacial layouts on a website. All of these things add meaning to what you're trying to communicate via the internet. So just to go over a couple of other things in digital communication and culture, it will have an impact on the directness and the indirectness of a message. When you're building a web presence, you should be aware that you're no longer talking to people within your own culture. You're talking to people in a cross cultural world. It's online, therefore, it's global. So you need to be aware of things like orientations to power. You need to be aware of the roles and relationships in online communication. You also need to be aware of the impact of non-verbal communication and the impact of multimodality. Take a look at various websites from around the world. For example, if you go to a website from, that was built in the Middle East for example, where symbols and ceremonial communication is quite important because of the culture. You'll notice that their website might be a little bit different. But then you need to ask, is it culturally aware of the more globalized community. The same thing could be said for a Chinese website, or an American website, or a British website. Now that you're communicating online, how appropriate is your language use?
