Technology Product Innovation and User Semiosis: An Interpretive Multimodal Social Semiotic Analysis

Abstract

Technological innovations disrupt established semiotic codes by altering product features and user interactions, necessitating new meaning-making. We investigate how the shift from manual transmission (MT) to automatic transmission (AT) in passenger cars transformed the meanings of driving in urban India. Through multimodal semiotic analysis, qualitative interviews with drivers, and observational data, we found that MT driving had become coded as masculine performance, requiring physical strength, coordination, and skill. The AT innovation eliminated clutch and gear-shifting actions, fundamentally altering the syntagmatic arrangement of driving signs. This disruption necessitated a renegotiation of meaning, so that participants reframed AT driving as “easy, simple, and comfortable”, a cultural association that, in the urban Indian context, came to be associated with feminine characteristics. Our findings demonstrate how technological change disrupts multimodal semiotic codes and reveal the cultural processes through which new meanings are negotiated, appropriated, and legitimised by the resulting code. We advance semiotic analysis by demonstrating how artifact signs and user actions jointly constitute multimodal codes that lead to changes in socially constructed meanings and how the code resulting from the innovations is appropriated by users.