The metapragmatics of remediated text design

As discourse increasingly depends on digital technologies, this article proposes an integrative view of text and the digital medium. As will be shown, authors and users of hypertexts constantly reflect on the appropriateness of manifold structural bonds holding between text composition and text design. In metapragmatic reflections, the users/readers relate a text’s audio-visual information to their previous knowledge of text design conventions. To describe the intermedial dimension of our metapragmatic analysis, we shall draw on Bolter and Grusin’s theory of Remediation (1999). Defining four elemental phases of remediation will then help to ascertain the full metapragmatic potential of text design for meaningmaking processes in both new and old media.