The Language of Social Media (original) (raw)

Digital discourse: Locating language in new/social media

CITATION DETAILS: Thurlow, C. (in press). Digital discourse: Locating language in new/social media. In J. Burgess, T. Poell & A. Marwick (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. New York: Sage. ABSTRACT: In this chapter, I introduce " digital discourse studies, " a field which attends to linguistic, sociolinguistic, and discursive phenomena in new/social media. Starting with a review of key moments, issues and scholars, I identify four broad organizing principles: discourse, technology, multimodality, and ideology. A key feature of digital discourse studies is its interest in both micro-level linguistic details (so called lowercase d-discourse) and more macro-level social processes (upper-case D-discourse); scholars are also increasingly interested in understanding how linguistic phenomena intersect with other meaning-making practices (e.g. images, typography, colour). Againist this backdrop, I then consider a range of indicative studies showing the range of communicative processes and linguistic practices covered in digital discourse research. These studies also point to four particular ways of understanding how language typically takes place in new/social media: as a metadiscursive resource, a metrolingual resource, a transmodalizing resource, and a technologizing resource.

Discourse of Twitter and Social Media

In this volume Michele Zappavigna lays the foundation for a forthcoming generation of work in internet linguistics, drawing on her training in social semiotics, linguistics and information technology. This necessarily involves discussion of how to gather data from Web 2.0, how to use corpus linguistics to process it, how to use functional linguistics to interpret it and how to use social semiotics to make sense of what is going on. The most dramatic turn here, as far as linguistics is concerned, is her interpersonal focus on ambient sociality. This she explores in terms of the way in which tweeters affi liate through searchable talk, demonstrating for the fi rst time in a large scale study how communities constitute themselves through shared values – where it’s not just interaction that matters but shared meaning and where what is being shared is feelings about ideas (not just the ideas themselves). This axiological orientation, based as it is on appraisal theory and quantitative analysis, goes a long way to balancing the ideational bias which has for so long delimited linguistics as a theory of writing and holds great promise for the evolution of a more social sensitive and socially responsible discipline in the years to come. This turn is not of course without its challenges. The sheer scale of the enterprise makes it hard to see the forest for the trees, making the development of novel two- and three-dimensional animated visualisations PREFACE xi a priority. Alongside this are the trials of streaming data, as a microblog unfolds, as a blogger develops and as Web 2.0 evolves; the contingencies of time matter and cannot be theorized away. Finally, and perhaps most challengingly, Web. 2.0 is more than words, and ever more so; this demands not just a linguistics of words but a semiotics of multimodality, with all the implications for data gathering, analysis, interpretation and theorizing such entails. To her credit, Zappavigna dodges none of these issues and, with respect to the fi rst two, shows us the way forward. We’ll be hearing a lot more from her along these lines.

Digital media discourse in linguistic research

The monograph "Digital media discourse in linguistic research" offers an exploration into the relationship between discourse as a manifestation of language in the digital media and the research possibilities available in the field of linguistics, but not without referring to sociolinguistics, media studies, etc. Substantial research has been devoted to the separate aspects of the subject matter initiated in this book. Especially during the last two decades, the media, discourse and the digital realm have been rather frequent topics successfully elaborated on by authors who have been given due credit in this book. However, it seemed to me that there are not enough resources that would provide systematic and comprehensive insights into how to analyse, understand, describe and further explore digital media discourse by relating linguistic research with theoretical frameworks from communication studies, political studies, journalism etc. These frameworks may, in fact, shed new light on how digital media discourse is both created and perceived while offering some new understanding of all the affordances and constraints entailed in digital media discourse in linguistic research.