This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating (...) in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study employs a multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis of text and image relations in material produced by the violent extremist organisation known as Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. The study focuses on iconisation, where meanings are condensed and interpersonally charged through ‘bonding icons’ which embody the organisation's world view and values. A sample of issues in the online magazine Dabiq produced by ISIS are analysed using Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The ISIS world view is shown (...) to be internally cohesive, based on a narrow, fundamentalist interpretation of selected Islamic scripture and violently opposed to any other world view. To represent, synthesise and justify its values and world view, ISIS uses bonding icons constructed from combinations of artefacts, supported by references to selected Islamic scripture. The study is a prelude to more detailed investigation of bonding icons in materials produced by ISIS, the attraction of SIS to potential mujahideen and ‘copy-cat’ jihadist groups and the recontextualisation of materials from Dabiq in different media platforms. Such studies would provide deeper insights into the workings of organisations such as ISIS, and facilitate the further development of multimodal social semiotic approaches to image and text relations. (shrink)

This article assesses the role of fear and envy in the British broadsheets' construction of the 2008 Beijing Olympics by examining coverage of conflict in Tibet and the opening ceremony of the Games, and considering them in the light of the wider socio-economic context of the time. Drawing on elements of evolutionary psychology, combined with aspects of Systemic Functional Grammar as well as intertextuality, it demonstrates how China is presented as a war-mongering force and is thus an object of fear. (...) In addition, the analysis demonstrates how the opening ceremony is effectively ‘spoiled’ by negative appraisal, which is characteristic of envy. In evolutionary terms, envy and fear, in this case, emerge as useful emotions which effectively serve to ‘disarm’ China at a time when China is on the verge of becoming the world's next superpower and Britain finds itself in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Added to this, London 2012 was on the horizon. (shrink)

Underpinned by the polemical idea that governments have redefined their role as a penal actor that prioritizes the practices of repressing, punishing, and confining people (instead of tackling the very complex root causes), this study scrutinizes how the press discursively collaborates with the State in ‘governing through crime’ (Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford University Press.). Drawing upon a corpus of Thai newspapers, the study analyzes (...) representational choices and identifies polarizing strategies in execution reports that serve to legitimize and neutralize the harshness of executions. The findings reveal that state-inflicted violence is mystified and downplayed by agent suppression and non-aggressive, judicially administered material processes. In contrast, executed individuals are dehumanized and their agency in sensational material processes foregrounded, which in turn constructs ideal victims. It is argued that this exaggerated, at times disturbing, dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ serves to project an image of the State as the champion of citizens’ and victims’ interests. A shift from the use of fault-assigning and consequence-imposing discourses to more holistic ones that attend to offenders’ and victims’ commonalitiesshould be adopted. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 5, November 2019, Page 522-530.