DOI 10.1515/text-2014-0004 Text&Talk 2014; 34(3): 283 – 305 Ilaria Moschini “You should’ve seen Luke!” or the multimodal encoding/decoding of the language of postmodern ‘webridized’ TV series Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the postmodern multimodal lan- guage of some contemporary American TV series and its gradual hybridization with the language (and practices) of social media. The paper begins with the analysis of popular television texts that have experimented with visual/musi- cal/narrative form in order to outline the main characteristics of their meaning- making processes. Then, it will explore the concept of “expanded transmedial- ity” according to which audiences participate in the co-construction of narratives (Stein and Busse 2012) to highlight the top-down/bottom-up ongoing exchange in franchise storytelling and it will focus on the textual features of some fan- generated artifacts that enter into these global narrations and where fans ex- ploit postmodern diegetic and editing forms. Finally, the paper will return to the analysis of television to investigate how the on-screen emergence of social media networks has influenced postmodern TV series in terms of their semantic and semiotic realization and/or fruition processes, giving rise to a ‘webridization’ of postmodern television textuality. Keywords: multimodality, postmodern meaning making, TV series, transmedia storytelling, user-generated contents, webridization Ilaria Moschini: Department of Languages, Literatures and Intercultural Studies, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy. E-mail: ilaria.moschini@unif.it 1 Postmodern ‘webridized’ textualities The technological revolution and, in particular, the growth of the “New Media” has led to the emergence of new forms of ‘textuality’ that have progressively hybridized more traditional textual artifacts. I investigated this process – which I label “webridization” – when dealing with the digital evolution of American political discourse during the US 2008 presidential election (Moschini 2010). In that context, I noticed that the language of politics and institutional messages Authenticated | ilaria.moschini@unifi.it author's copy Download Date | 4/29/14 9:02 AM