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This paper sets out a multimodal framework that can be used to explore the ways in which people are positioned as individuals and groups within the selfies and other kinds of representations found in video-sharing practices. Unlike earlier, monomodal accounts of selfies, the framework accounts for the visual, aural and verbal resources that are used in video-sharing. The analysis focuses on the videos and photos that are produced and consumed in the Featured Stories of Snapchat as collective accounts of public events of different kinds. The results show that, in Snapchat, constructing group identities is prominent, both in selfies and quasi-selfies. This reflects a discourse of ‘us-ness’ current in many forms of social media, and which prizes particular forms of sociality. The uses of this discourse are ideologically charged, and include the strategic use of synthetic collectivisation as an emerging form of audio-visual communication which contrives to position the individual member of the audience as if they were part of a larger group, sharing the same experience and perspective as the person creating the video. The framework is used in this paper to examine the ways in which the collective identities of fans, mourners and protestors are constructed in Featured Stories from Snapchat, but is of relevance to many other forms of multimodal communication that are shared through social media sites and services.

This article draws from an ethnographically motivated non-participant observation of an ongoing and very young online patient support community in the UK, to present an analysis of its discursive practices. It demonstrates how it performs populism (c.f. Canovan, 1982, 1999; McRae, 1969), and both draws upon and contributes to a climate of opinion (Gunther et al, 2011) fuelled by what has recently been described as media populism (Krämer, 2014). Using the theoretical lens of populism and climate of opinion, it demonstrates how the more than sixty thousand strong social media ‘army’ (61,337 members at the time of writing this paper) formed around a terminally ill baby at the centre of a parent-judiciary-hospital legal battle in Britain in 2017, uses key tropes and devices of populist rhetoric to establish lay-expertise in its performance of support for the ordinary patient and their family, de-recognising and vilifying medical expertise and publicly funded healthcare systems built on socio-democratic ideals. The article also demonstrates how ordinary users’ mobilisation of populist rhetoric to reject both professional expertise and public institutions, make use of established architectural features of the online community’s socio-technological design (c.f. Escobar, 1994; Ley, 2007), such as immediacy, remediation and protective gatekeeping. Populism has, till now, been used largely for the study of politics and mediated political communication (c.f. Meyer, 2006; Hameleers & Schmuck, 2017). By drawing upon this body of work to inform the analysis of a patient-support community (see also Loader et al 2002; Preece 2010; Armstrong et al, 2011 on online patient communities), this paper also discusses the public implications of these findings, calling for considerations of the impact of digitally mediated populist ideologies, campaigns and rhetoric on public perceptions and expectations of healthcare systems and professionals.

This paper reports on a case study on collaborative research writing in computer science, with particular focus on the researchers' use of digital writing and social media tools. The research paper is still a prominent genre in the field, but technological advances such as the development of real-time collaborative writing tools and social media have created new opportunities for collaboration as well as the sharing of research results. This paper takes a closer look at how digital tools, particularly collaborative writing tools and Twitter, are utilised in the process of producing a research paper for publication, and how the authors and their colleagues view the role of such tools in the text production process. The data include a text history of a research paper, as well as research interviews with the main authors and their colleagues. The data have been approached from a local practices perspective, considering the paper as part of the writing practices of the multicultural research group where the authors worked. The interviews provide further perspectives on the researchers' use of digital tools. The findings shed light on collaborative research writing practices, particularly how collaborative writing tools, which enable new practices such as synchronous writing, may not be utilised by the researchers in the ways intended by the developers. The findings also highlight the significance of social media tools, particularly Twitter, in post publication activities, with important implications for researcher education. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper uses a multimodal mixed methods approach for exploring general recontextualisation patterns of violent extremist images in online media. Specifically, the paper reports on the preliminary findings of a preliminary study which investigates various patterns in the reuse of images which appear in ISIS’s official propaganda magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah by others across various public online media platforms (e.g. news websites, social media news aggregates, blogs). Using a mixed methods approach informed by multimodal discourse analysis, and combined with data mining and information visualisation, the study addresses questions such as which types of images produced and used by ISIS in its propaganda magazines recirculate most frequently in other online media over time, on which types of online media these images reappear, and in which contexts they are used and reused on these websites, that is that is, whether the tone of the message is corporate (formal) or personal (informal). Preliminary findings from the study suggest different recontextualisation patterns for certain types of ISIS-related images of over time. The study also found that the majority of violent extremist images used in the sample analysis appear to circulate most frequently on Western news and politics websites and news aggregate platforms, in predominantly formal contexts.

Studies point to the positive role Twitter can play in social justice campaigns. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks in detail at one such case: a racist call-out in Canada, which trended on Twitter in many countries leading to its coverage in mainstream media outlets. It had the characteristics, labelled at the time by critics, of ‘cancel culture’, where there were calls for sackings and boycotts. This analysis demonstrates that there should be caution in regard to how social media platforms such as Twitter are able to lead in such matters of social justice. The paper shows how its affordances can work against coherent and careful discussion, fostering fast, simplified, contradictory commentary, where individual tweets load a range of different concerns onto a specific instance. In this particular case, this results in an individualization of racism, which therefore becomes decontextualized and depoliticized. While those tweeting revel in and enjoy their shared moral position, actual endemic structural racism in society remains invisible, and they misrepresent, arguably, the key question that this racist outburst raises.

This paper examines the phrase #bindersfullofwomen as an example of searchable talk in the microblogging sphere of Twitter. The data were collected and sampled in terms of its temporal development on Twitter. Drawing on the content analysis combined with descriptive statistics, the paper identified and compared the Twitter users as Journalist users and Ordinary users who are engaged with Twitter communication. It shows that Journalists tend to initiate the topic at the early stage of communication. Soon afterwards, the Ordinary participants dominate the Twitter communication. The tweets are textually characterized into three different categories on the formal grounds: Hashtags, Hashtags plus texts and anything with a link" or "a retweet", in the heteroglossic context of micro-blogging sphere. The categorization of tweets contributes as a methodology to distinguish the discourse practice performed by different Twitter users. The results show that both Journalist and Ordinary favor to post the informative tweets throughout the sampled period. The quantity of interactive tweets is becoming less favorable; however, in contrast, the tweets on the indeterminate plane gain high popularity from the early phase of the period. Our comparison indicates that the boundary between Journalist and Ordinary seems to be indistinct in terms of their contents.

In Finland, a social category called “pissis girls” has evolved into a cultural concept, used widely in various discourses concerning young women. In the paper, the empirical focus is on how, in the context of a viral video disseminated in social media, a group of young girls are presented as representatives of this category. The video, called ÄM IRK, is a short edited clip of an emergent interaction between young men and girls meeting by chance in a park. Drawing on the notions of membership categorisation, cluster of indexes and indexical field, “enoughness” and authentication, the paper investigates how the edited video, through the means of de- and recontextualisation of the emergent interaction evokes the category of the pissis girls in the ways in which it represents young adolescent girls. More specifically, the paper shows how the edited video uses selected emblems and activities that have been interpreted as key indices of the pissis category, such as the use of alcohol and the appearance and vanity of the girls, as semiotic material evocative “enough” to make the category of pissisness salient. Furthermore, in order to categorise someone as an authentic pissis girl, one has to show how the girls deviate from the ones who are not, that is, the “ordinary” or “good” or “appropriate” girls. And, in turn, when some emblems and activities are considered bound to the pissis girl category, the norms concerning girls in general become visible. In the video, the dynamics of categorisation, authentication, and normativity merge. peerReviewed

This paper aims to investigate identity construction on a social network site, the largest microblog platform, Sina Microblog, in China. By focusing on the action types and language use in the status updates and personal profiles of ten college student users from China together with individual interviews, this study finds that microblog users employ a variety of strategies to construct their online identities, such as different action types; visual, enumerative, narrative and self-labelling practices; and different forms of internet language. The results also show that microblog users tend to use more implicit identity claims and strategically use language to construct situation-appropriate multiple identities, using identity rhetoric to achieve some communicative needs. The user, displayed friends and distant audiences triangulate to mould and portray their online identities on the Sina Microblog. The related factors that shape identity construction are described, and the implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper focuses on the negotiation of normativity in Facebook pages that create, share and react to multimodal cultural artefacts generally known as internet memes. Attention is paid to performances of ‘vigilante’ identity – reactions in comment sections to perceived or possible transgressions against normative orders of the community. It is assumed that normative negotiations largely depend on characteristics of internet memes that are also shaped by their trajectories of usage in various environments, and hence also by their history. Identity work is thus approached as a chronotopically organized phenomenon; memes appear in certain chronotopic (timespace) configurations which ratify certain communicative practices and the way people orient to them in discussion. Seeing much of the identity work as chronotopically organized and dialogically negotiated opens up the path to a greater degree of complexity in analysis and brings new insights for the study of identity in social media.

Dutch political party 'Forum voor Democratie' grew from a small party with two seats in the House of Representatives to becoming the largest party in the 2019 provincial elections. Since its creation in 2016, it has been accused of engaging in populist tactics, and has been labelled a far right party. This paper examines these claims by means of a qualitative Social Media - Critical Discourse Study of 250 tweets posted from March 2017 to March 2019 on the accounts of the party and its leader Thierry Baudet. Drawing on the concept of "algorithmic populism", we show that prototypical right-wing populist tropes such as othering, heartland, leadership, and conspiracy theorizing are all visible patterns in the Twitter discourse of both Baudet and the party. We conclude by discussing how these tropes are articulated more provocatively in Baudet's personal account, and the general significance of the media conscious style of far right politics articulated by the party. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Departing from systemic-functional studies of the genre of face to face shopping, the paper provides a cartography of an online fashion shopping site, showing how it consists of an array of micro genres (themselves hybrids of genres such as advertisements, fashion spreads, lifestyle magazine articles and Instagram style social media photography) which can be navigated in different ways, yet always connect to purchase options. Multimodally, online fashion shopping entextualizes face to face fashion shopping and in the process transduces embodied modes of communication into text and image, relying a great deal more on language than its face to face equivalent.

Social media advertising, with its interactivity, has become a critical site for brand-consumer relationship building. Recent work on its use for relational functions is primarily confined to the field of marketing, yet little attention has been paid to the linguistic devices that support relationship building on social media plarforms. In this paper, an empirical study is conducted on the use of metadiscourse in WeChat public account advertisements (hereafter WPA ads). Specifically, it examines how three interactional metadiscourse subcategories (engagement markers, self-mentions, and attitude markers) are used for relational acts in Chinese WPA ads. Analysis was conducted on 50 selected advertisements published in 2018 on the public WeChat accounts of five brands in different industries (mobile phone, laptop, tourism, electric appliance, and motorcar). The results indicate that engagement markers, self-mentions, and attitude markers, along with their distinctive linguistic devices, are used to perform the relational acts of directing, addressing, and expressing in WPA ads. This study extends the scope of metadiscourse research by investigating the use of metadiscourse in WPA ads while contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the interpersonal function of metadiscourse in WPA ads. It has implications for the technical writing of WPA ads, raising advertisers’ awareness of how to employ metadiscourse to build solidarity with readers and manage their corporate image in an era of e-commerce. It also evidences the usefulness of applying a pragmatic concept to metadisocurse research, providing insight into how metadiscourse might be approached by drawing on notions from fields other than discourse analysis.

During the 2011 UK public sector protests, controversy ignited over the “Miliband Loop”, an unedited video from a pool interview showing Labour leader Ed Miliband to have provided largely the same answer in response to six questions. The interviewer subsequently complained in a TwitLonger that the incident epitomized the clash of public relations and journalism. In this paper we unpack the practical production of the pool interview as a delamination of the interview-as-lived from the interview-as-media-production-mechanism. We then explore professional and public understanding (or lack thereof) of exposure of this delamination issue and its relation to politics. While the controversy did not directly affect Miliband׳s position as leader, it is clear that the Internet is a dangerous place for the old rules of mediatization.

This study explores variation in temporal reference within a dataset of 1000 user-generated online consumer reviews, sampled from 5 different websites. Analyzing the proportion of references to recency compared with references to remoteness in these texts, an overall trend toward remoteness was found, which diverges from earlier findings about temporality in other types of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter . Further considering specific examples from three of the five review sites ( Yelp , Amazon , and Epicurious ), this paper offers insights into how both the remote past and the present are variably deployed as discursive resources by the authors of these online texts. In addition, the study׳s findings reveal that whereas lexical resources are used to refer to the present/recent past, references to the remote past rely much more on grammatical resources. Consequently, in order to provide a more complete account of time reference, I argue that it is important to consider a broader range of linguistic features (e.g., grammatical aspect, prepositional phrases) rather than concentrating exclusively on temporal adverbs when making claims about temporality in social media.

Social media have been viewed as an important channel through which dissenting and marginalized voices can be disseminated and discussed in authoritarian political settings, such as Cambodia. Drawing on a case study of viral discussions on Facebook concerning a hit-and-run traffic accident that took place in March 2019 in Cambodia, this paper explores (1) the key themes that arose from the online conversations and whether they constituted counterpublic discourse, (2) the discursive strategies used by online discussants, and (3) the political implications of such online phenomena. Based on a thematic and discourse analysis of 5000 Facebook comments generated from 100 widely shared public posts about the incident, the study uncovered a number of recurrent themes emerging from the online interactions, most of which were critical of the authoritarian establishment. The study also identified three key discursive strategies employed by Facebook users to discuss and question the status quo: satire, direct criticism and rumour. In addition, guided by Fraser (1990) and Warner (2002)’s concepts of “counterpublics” and boyd (2010)’s recent notion of “networked publics”, the study argues that, through such online discursive interactions, a new social identity in the form of online counterpublics has been formed.

Drawing on the papers of the Special Issue on “Authenticity and normativity in social media”, this discussion piece points out a number of key themes for research on authenticity in digital language practices. I argue that the theoretical backdrop provided by the deconstruction of authenticity in sociolinguistics must be complemented by taking into account the specific conditions of social media as a site of communicative action that is central to contemporary mediatized societies. In the new public spheres constituted in social media, the display of authenticity is a core value in the production of discourse for a personal public. Displays of authenticity in social media are made available to a networked public whose follow-up discourses can involve remarkable linguistic reflexivity and normativity. Constructions and negotiations of authenticity in social media are found to draw on multilingual repertoires. Their objects of normative assessment are registers of language, which form part of an indexical order that can draw on globally circulating as well as locally anchored semiotic elements. Research in this area is likely to benefit from polycentric and transmedia strategies, which enable researchers to follow actors and their authenticating practices across on and offline spaces.

The focus of this article is how linguistic reflexivity, the organization of linguistic features and the normative behavior following from these processes takes place across online and offline activities among a group of adolescents who daily interact with one another though several modes of communication. In the paper I argue that written discourse have taken up a much more important role in people׳s everyday discursive practices because of the widespread availability and impact of social media. As a consequence of this I make the claim that spoken and written discourse in combination should be considered when studying everyday language use and processes of enregisterment. In this article I illustrate how young people from a linguistically and culturally diverse area of Copenhagen use linguistic features indexical of speech styles in their linguistic practices on Facebook. I study how the use of such linguistic resources points towards different stereotypes and what sense of rights and sanctions are involved in the reactions to the use of these different types of marked language use. I study this to discuss how spoken language practices and practices associated with writing co-contribute to similar processes of enregisterment.

In this paper, we investigate how adolescents living in late modern Copenhagen use and organize identity categories related to ethnicity in everyday interaction. From a perspective of linguistic ethnography we analyze exchanges where ethnicity is explicitly addressed in activities such as creating and maintaining friendship ties, teasing, flirting, etc. We show how ethnicity is brought about in media trends on Facebook, how it becomes associated with hip hop culture, how it is used in constructions of beauty and desirability, and how a societal discourse of ethnocentricity have consequences for patterns of identification, but also make up a resource in everyday interaction. We present data from one year of fieldwork among a group of pupils all attending the same school class with a special focus on two individuals and analyze three thematically interrelated key cases against the backdrop of the patterns we observe in the year-long data material. We show how our participants treat ethnicity as something to play around with, negotiate, transcend and create new versions of. At the same time though, we also find in our data instances in which our participants bring into play traditional “old-school” ethnicities and thereby mobilize fixed categories ideologically associated with authenticity as an actual aspect of ethnicization (Brubaker, 2004. Ethnicity without groups. Harvard University Press, Cambridge). In line with Otsuji and Pennycook (2010. Int. J. Multiling.7(3), 240–254) we therefore argue that fixed and fluid ethnicity categories are not brought into play as dichotomies but rather as symbiotically (re)constituting each other.

Places have meanings and significances beyond mere location or functionality. This assertion becomes especially salient for migrants, whose status is defined by a physical move from one place to another. The aim of this paper is to discuss the practice of place-making by migrants, with specific focus on the role of Facebook in this endeavour. We present the particular case of Amy, a Filipina immigrant to New Zealand, and her Facebook activities. Central to the discussion is a four-minute audio-visual piece that she produced herself and posted online to commemorate her family’s second year as New Zealanders. Guided by the framework of multimodality, the concept of place, and the practice of everyday photography, and with invaluable insights from a semi-structured interview of the participant, we illustrate how semiotic resources afforded by social media sites such as Facebook foster the construction of the discourse of the good life and a claim to national belonging. Our analysis shows that everyday family photography, in interaction with social media, potentially signifies migrants’ becoming a natural part of the national landscape. By interrogating the boundaries of private and public spaces, and reproducing the “migrant gaze” in everyday family photography, Amy transforms images into unified strands of the ideal immigrant narrative.

In this paper we contribute to discussions on the relation between language, place and legitimacy in contemporary globalization, including considerations of mobility, social media, and authenticity. Our empirical case is the Danish born performing artist Anita Lerche. Lerche sings in Punjabi, and in addition to language she deploys other semiotic elements which index India and Punjab. This triggers both negative and positive evaluations from her audience. In some cases, it even triggers (self) criticism of the deficient Punjabiness of Diaspora Punjabis. The overwhelming majority of the responses are based on an ideology of an inherent and natural relation between language and ethnic or geographical belonging. Lerche clearly does not conform to that as she explores her possibilities of identification and professional success beyond traditional borders and territories. The data analyzed consist of discussions on social media, and mainly responses to one of Lerche׳s Facebook posts. Despite the non-local character of the medium, and the different places of residence of the audience, a particular geographical location (Punjab) remains central in the construction of belonging, legitimacy, obligation and authenticity. In addition to data on Lerche׳s Facebook profile, we also draw on interviews with Lerche and some fieldwork.

This paper analyses discourse, power and context on social media. Through a theoretical discussion of the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’, we highlight the growing importance of understanding ‘individual communicative nuance’ (ICN) and complex power relations in the production and interpretation of online texts. But ICN is not the only problematic practice of online communications; there are other social and environmental factors that impact upon the production, consumption and interpretation of social media. Whilst adopting previous understandings of discourse, context and social practice we refine and apply models of panoptic and synoptic power that are applicable to the communicative complexities of the social media. These dimensions of power, we argue, are unfixed and shift according to the contextual environments in which they are produced and consumed. Hence, we show that critical discourse studies (CDS) can incorporate theoretical frameworks that provide the investigative and analytical approaches necessary for exploring power relations in digital media technologies. By developing this theoretical approach we propose the concept of synoptic resistance, which mobilizes oppositional power against authoritative surveillance. Whilst we do not deny that broader social structures maintain top-down power, we argue that ‘omnioptic’ media environments complicate these power relations in the ‘countercurrents’ they provide against authority.

Although research on multilingual writing has widely explored transliteration and, particularly, Romanization practices, we know little about how related phenomena are reconfigured in social media contexts where users can manipulate a wide range of writing resources and navigate between multiple intertwining audiences. By analysing more than one thousand tokens of forms that illustrate what appears as reversed Romanization (i.e. English-related forms written with Greek characters, engreek), the study aims to discover, first, how these forms are created and, second, for what purposes, and for whom, they are mobilised at given moments. In order to address these questions, I propose a translanguaging lens for the study of multilingual digital writing and draw on the notion of trans-scripting as key for understanding such writing practices as creative and performative. My findings reveal that there is a link between trans-scripting as a creative practice and digital orality, as users orient primarily to phonetic respellings of the English-related forms and associate such spellings with particular forms of stylized speech and social personas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the study’s implications to research on the role of English as a resource for multilingual writing and current debates about language diversity and fluidity in the digital mediascape.