A multimodal discourse study of selected Covid-19 online public health campaign texts in Nigeria

Bibliographic Data

ID12253169
AuthorsTunde Ope-Davies (0000-0002-1772-6356, University of Lagos, corresponding author), Mojisola Shodipe (University of Lagos)
Year2023
Volume34
Issue1
Pages96-119
Publication date2023-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiscourse & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0957-9265 • E-ISSN: 1460-3624
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/09579265221145098
PMID37829509
OpenAlexW4313559063
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited22

This paper discusses web-based public health discursive practices during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Nigeria. It utilises a multimodal discourse approach to explore how a combination of textual and visual resources was deployed to communicate informative and educative public health safety campaigns during the period. Essentially, this study discusses multimodal resources as a rhetorical technique for creating a public discursive engagement space designed to educate the public and mitigate the effect of the pandemic. The dataset was collected during and after the lockdown in 2020 (March-September) through media monitoring and manual downloading of relevant online COVID-19 posts, messages and public health advisories largely from WhatsApp platforms and the portals of some Nigerian national newspapers. Using insights from relevant approaches in discourse analysis (e.g. Multimodal Discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis), we adopted a qualitative content analysis approach to analyse on how online posts as multimodal resources amplify the role of social media affordances in producing and promoting public safety messages helped to control the spread and mitigate the effects of the pandemic. The study also shows that discursive and multimodal resources were deliberately deployed to increase the effectiveness of the technology-driven public health campaign. To a large extent, multimodal resources were found to complement lexico-semantic properties of online communication, where social media messages are created, crafted and reconstructed within a uniquely Nigerian public discourse context. The study further illustrates the increasing importance of web-based platforms as discursive sites for enacting and negotiating meanings during event-driven social activities and public engagement in the Global South

Affordance · Context (archaeology · Critical discourse analysis · Discourse analysis · Linguistics · Multimodality · Political science · Politics · Public health · Public relations · Rhetorical question · Social media · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Medicine · Psychology · Public Relations and Crisis Communication

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access