Pervasive Technologies and the Paradoxes of Multimodal Digital Communication

Contemporary societies are greatly challenged by paradoxes in all facets of life. Digital communication encodes and produces mean-ing by making use of these contradictory relations. In this contri-bution, three digital paradoxes will be presented. Th e fi rst paradox is grounded in the process of remediation in digital settings which mirrors a contradictory double logic. Digital culture, in fact, wants both to multiply its media and to eliminate all traces of mediation. Th e second antinomy has its origins in the new concept of linguistic entropy: a structured information disorder that is regulated by us-ability and multimodality. In accordance with the second paradox, the third one stems from further processes that are framing, a mul-timodal resource, and linking, a hypertextual resource