Popularizing Science in the Digital Era

Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive overview of TED talks as a digital-multimodal video genre, exploring the ways in which myriad rhetorical, structural, digital, and multimodal resources are used to communicate scientific knowledge to lay audiences. Drawing on insights from genre analysis, the systemic functional approach to multimodal discourse analysis, and the social semiotic approach to multimodality, the volume examines the communicative contexts in which TED talks are constructed, their rhetorical structure, the deployment of multimodal tools, and diachronic developments. The book reflects on the ways in which TED talks are uniquely positioned to offer new insights into how experts disseminate scientific knowledge for non-specialist audiences, constructed as they are within a community defined by a fluidity and diversity of audiences and speakers. The volume offers strategies for not only making the process of disseminating specialized knowledge more engaging and accessible but also expanding their own semiotic and communicative repertoires, increasingly crucial in our digitally driven era. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of English for Specific Purposes, multimodality, discourse analysis, and digital communication.