Epistemic vigilance in travel documentaries: investigating top-down and bottom-up processes in multimodal manipulation

The concept of manipulation has been a matter of discussion in CDS and pragmatics for more than a decade. Agreement on how to define and analyse the latter has yet to be reached, although most scholars seem to agree that Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) can provide a useful entry point thanks to its theorisation of variable contexts and individual cognitive environments (de Saussure, 2005; Maillat, 2013; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Oswald, 2014). Moreover, the concept of epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010) has been used to investigate the cognitive barriers that need to be bypassed in order for manipulation to work (Hart, 2013; Mazzarella, 2015). Finally, Sorlin (2017: 133) recently highlighted the need to focus not only on the cognitive aspects influencing manipulation, but also on “the psychological aspect of manipulation that often consists in exploiting the target's weaknesses”, thus pointing towards the dimension of affect as a further explanatory force.

This paper begins with an overview of the concepts of manipulation and epistemic vigilance. Then, drawing on some principles from Relevance Theory and looking at some data from travel documentary programmes and their viewers, examples are offered of how manipulation is attempted and achieved through this specific multimodal genre in individual case studies. The focus of the analysis will be on both top-down (i.e. viewer-driven) and bottom-up (i.e. text-driven) processes. Results suggest that a combination of both is necessary for manipulation to take place, but also that the affective dimension, predominantly attended to through sonic and visual modes, plays a key role for multimodal manipulation to successfully occur.

The research draws on a novel methodological approach (Castaldi, 2021) that integrates Audience Research (e.g., Schrøder et al., 2003) and Social Semiotics (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1999; Machin and Mayr, 2012; Machin, 2014) in order to analyse media interactions in their individuality and proposes that manipulation should be considered as a scalar phenomenon, which varies in accordance with the unique cognitive environments participating in a communicative event.