‘Shall We Talk’: Synthetic personalization and resemiotization in a mental health campaign

Public mental health discourse in different parts of the world has shown a common tendency to employ more creative or playful communicative resources (e.g., visual art, comics, online memes, social media posts) to discuss mental wellbeing and engage the audience (e.g., Bennett, 2023; El Refaie, 2019; Huang, 2024; Huang & Jaworski, 2023). This study demonstrates how a recent mental health campaign in Hong Kong utilizes a chain of online and offline discourse artefacts derived from a 2001 Cantopop song, Shall We Talk, to promote mental health awareness and services. To achieve this goal, it combines the theories of multimodality (Kress, 2010), resemiotization (Iedema, 2003) and synthetic personalization (Fairclough, 1995) in examining a series of digital and physical publications by the campaign, including videos, logos, websites, social media content and advertisements displayed in public spaces.

The study finds the campaign strategically ‘recycling’ parts of the Cantopop song’s lyrics and message in creating visually spectacular(ized), colloquial texts that directly engage the audience in fleeting conversations about their mental wellbeing. These texts perform an array of direct speech acts that enact synthetic personalization (Fairclough, 1995), that is, addressing a mass audience as if they were individuals, in public communication settings. Meanwhile, they are packaged into different genres of digital and physical discourse and combined with visuals which imbue the encouraged kind of private conversations on mental health with the senses of calmness, gentleness, comfort and order. In this way, the campaign resemiotizes a musical discourse into a chain of texts and artefacts that simultaneously amplify and de-sensitize private communication about personal emotions and wellbeing. Inserted into public spaces, the amplified and de-sensitized private discourse can create disruptive but also somewhat reassuring discursive spaces for a health topic/issue that may have been often neglected or silenced in the local society. The findings can help enrich the theoretical understanding of more multimodal and creative forms of public (mental) health communication. They can also provide useful evidence-based insights for public mental health communicators who would experiment with more creative methods to expand their outreach or impact.