Introduction Moroccan Channels, Channeling Moroccanness

This chapter introduces the ways Moroccans engaged media despite a widespread feeling of communicative failure. It also outlines how they viewed language and media as sharing some of the same channeling qualities at the same time that they tried to distinguish their views from others. Ethnographic vignettes lay out the key laments generating relationality in Fez: media failure, language mediation, and Moroccanness. This chapter also explains the key semiotic theories on multimodality and phatic connectivity developed throughout the book.