Cognition, relevance and ideology formation through travel documentaries: A longitudinal approach to audiences

Within the field of multimodal research, one of the earliest and most successful attempts to investigate cognitive mechanisms has been the analysis of texts within the communicative framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). Forceville (1996; 2020), Infantidou and Tzanne (2006) and Yus (1998; 2016) are examples of this approach applied to the domains of advertising and comics. The findings from these integrated approaches of multimodality and cognition have provided some extremely useful insights into the interpretation of multimodal texts and shown how Relevance Theory principles can be fruitfully applied beyond face-to-face communication.

More recently, Castaldi (2021; 2022; under review) carried out some case studies which looked at ideology formation through travel documentaries. The research draws on a novel methodological approach (Castaldi, 2021) that integrates Audience Research (e.g., Schrøder et al., 2003), Social Semiotics (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1999; Machin and Mayr, 2012) and Relevance Theory in order to analyse how specific media interactions may affect the ideologies of viewers. This paper takes this methodological approach one step further by reporting on a longitudinal follow-up to the original case studies, which explores the extent to which the travel documentaries had a long-lasting effect on the participants who watched them.

After a brief discussion of key concepts and of the methodological approach, the paper will look at examples from the case studies to discuss possible ideological influences of the documentaries on the viewers. The cognitive processes that may be at play, both top-down (i.e. viewer-driven) and bottom-up (i.e. text-driven), will be discussed: these are framed within Relevance Theory principles and include instances of manipulative multimodal discourse as well as extended mythological narratives, which can be seen as higher-order figurative discourses.