https://www-cambridge-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/core/books/making-sense/part-0-meaning/DCBC97E7A7679CDDD42B287C06E2C04A#FN-fn-42" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Footnote ⁴²

Multimodality and synesthesia are essential to our expressively human natures. However, notwithstanding the realities of contiguous, overlapping, hybrid, and crossover forms, the analytical distinctions still need to be made between forms. Each has an archetypical grammar.

To return to the example of written and oral forms,^§MS0.2.7a there are many crossover forms – reading aloud, music lyrics, theater dialogue, technical or academic talk, text messaging, instant messages, social media activity stream posts, tweets, emails, or quoted direct speech, for instance. This does not undermine the strong distinction we want to make between speaking and writing as meaning forms. These hybrid meaning-practices do not reduce the canonical differences. Rather, they are examples of multimodality, where two quite different meaning forms are brought together and for the most practical of reasons, the very differences in form that make for complementarity in multimodal meaning.

Digital technologies of representation and communication intensify these processes of multimodality and synesthesia. They offer, as never before in the history of media, a common platform for the construction and rendering of meaning in multiple forms. The forms become more permeable and more malleable than ever. A wider range of forms becomes accessible to a wider of range of people for their practices of representation and communication. But for the greater access, the gains we seem to be making as a partly self-made species seem small.

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⁴² Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Eveline Chan, and Leanne Dalley-Trim, 2016, Literacies (Edn 2), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 233–4.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 34. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Synesthesia §0.2.9