Multilogue and Platform Capitalism: Limits of Typological Description

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 130):

Up until this point we have largely been concerned with how social relations are negotiated in monologue and dialogue. But in contemporary society there are many ways in which we enact these relations without necessarily interacting directly with other people – via broadcast and digital media. Multilogue communication has become an important feature of contemporary social life due to the expansion of "semiotic technologies" (technologies for making meaning) (Zhao, Djonov, & van Leeuwen, 2014) affording one-to-many and many-to-many communication. This kind of communication has engendered 'status-updating' and various kinds of comment genres whereby people share their experiences and opinions with others in real-time on social media. The expanded communicative affordances offered by such digital platforms have augmented the ways in which people can interact, both in terms of increasing the range of connection possible and reducing the extent to which direct interaction is required for tenor to be negotiated (Zappavigna, 2018; Zappavigna & Martin, 2018a). At the same time, social media platforms operate by the essential logic inherent in digital platform economies – namely that of aiming to profit financially from the ways in which people connect with one another. They thus advance a capitalist agenda that has pervaded the last few centuries towards what is perhaps its maximal endgame – i.e., our very social relations are now being mined for profit.

ChatGPT Comments:

This paragraph attempts to bring digital communication into the orbit of SFL’s account of tenor by invoking “multilogue” and “semiotic technologies.” Yet the treatment is conceptually shallow. First, the distinction between dialogue, monologue, and multilogue is offered descriptively rather than systemically. In SFL, negotiation of social relations requires modelling as options within a network; here, however, we are given only a typological list. “Multilogue” is introduced as if naming were theorisation, when in fact the phenomenon remains unmodelled.

Second, the invocation of “semiotic technologies” draws on Zhao et al. without any effort to integrate the notion into the SFL stratified framework. Technologies may be affordances for meaning, but the question for SFL is how those affordances restructure the organisation of tenor as a system. That is left unaddressed. Instead, the analysis slides into an anecdotal catalogue of “status-updating” and “comment genres,” with no attempt to specify what system(s) these instantiate or expand.

Finally, the pivot to platform capitalism—while not incorrect in its sociological diagnosis—remains grafted onto the discussion rather than integrated into the theoretical account. To say that social relations are “mined for profit” is not to explain how tenor is reconfigured under these conditions. The effect is a layering of political critique atop a descriptive typology, rather than a systemic-functional analysis.

In short, the paragraph offers an important problem—the reorganisation of social relations through digital platforms—but fails to develop the categories needed to model it.