Genre plus time & place of access steer the interpretation of visual/multimodal discourse
What is it about?
How is it that mass-communicative visuals combined with minimal written text are by and large correctly interpreted in the way their creator intended? The answer is: because the envisaged audience (a) recognizes the genre to which the image belongs, and is knowledgeable about the purpose of the genre to which it belongs; (b) accesses the image at a moment that is to a considerable extent foreseen by the creator; (c) accesses the image at a location which is to a considerable extent foreseen by the creator. In the case of Peter van Straaten's tear-off calendar cartoons, the audience knows (a) the cartoons are supposed to be funny, making one smile; (b) they are typically seen and read in the morning of a new day; (c) the calendar often hangs in the home, often on the toilet.
Why is it important?
Whereas in face-to-face communication interlocutors can continually check whether they correctly understand each other, mass-communication does not allow for immediate feedback. One might think that as a result, mass-communicative messages, particularly purely visual messages or visual messages only accompanied by a sentence or so (= a type of multimodal communication) would often be misinterpreted. The claim in this paper is that the chances of misinterpretation are enormously reduced by the fact that both mass-communicators and their envisaged audiences trust that they share awareness about the purpose of the message -- and this purpose is closely tied to its genre: the 8 o'clock news wants to inform; the advertisement wants to sell; the non-political cartoon wants to entertain; and the political cartoon wants to criticize politicians in an entertaining manner. The analyses of ten Peter van Straaten cartoons thus help outline what theoretical concepts are needed for a full-blown theory of mass-communication.