Master Communication and Information Studies | Master's degree | Media & Communications | On Campus | 1 year | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | Netherlands

Some think of multimodal communication as something modern, as text and video are combined on websites, or as we both hear and see people we are talking with through apps on our smartphones. Yet humans have been communicating multimodally since prehistoric times, with vocal sounds and hand gestures. Despite the fast pace of digital technology development, videos are played and texts are read largely on the same real-time scale as that of face-to-face interaction – the human time scale. How and why are different kinds of meanings and functions distributed over different modes of communication? How are those meanings, functions, and modes integrated in different media, including the embodied medium of face-to-face interaction? In this MA track you will learn how multimodal communication works, meaning both how different forms of it are constructed and how they communicate ideas in different ways (such as making abstract ideas easier to understand through metaphors). Attention is given to the use of both written and spoken language in combination with other modes of communication.