In this project, we will investigate the digital resemiotisation of buying and selling interaction through a comparative study of online and face-to-face shopping. Online shopping is rapidly growing and increasingly affects all of us. It not only transforms the high streets of our towns as more and more shops close down, but also the way customers and retailers interact. Moreover, it has changed the way good and services can be displayed and the way goods can be examined, which in turn transforms the perceived and real risks customers as well as retailers are exposed to.
What was, in face-to-face shopping, an embodied and situated interaction, now comes to resemble a text as goods that could be physically displayed, touched and handled in physical markets and shops must now be presented, inspected and selected by means of words and images. This requires technical, linguistic and visual literacies not everyone has access to.
Shopping is thus a crucial case for the study of digital resemiotisation. Fierce competition among online retailers constantly pushes semiotic innovation, making it an extremely rich case in terms of the semiotic resources at play. Moreover, it can be argued that all online practices are ultimately modelled on the principles of the market, which positions us as consumers rather than citizens.
Problem statement and research questions
The project will depart from the following project statement:How is shopping resemiotised when it moves from face-to-face buying/selling encounters to online environments, and what consequences does this have for customers?
The problem statement can be expanded into four interrelated research questions:
- How do buying/selling encounters unfold in online and face-to-face shopping environments?
- How is the interaction between buyers and sellers multimodally realized in these different environments?
- What skills do buyers and sellers need in each of these forms of shopping?
- Which theoretical and methodological developments are needed to capture this?
These questions will be answered through a combined lab and field based study integrating multimodal semiotics and multimodal conversation analysis. Findings from studying shopping with these approaches will be related to insights from marketing studies in social science, so spearheading new bridges between different approaches to the study of (online) shopping.