ABSTRACT Using the example of the Twitter feed #MeToo, this paper argues that CDS, in its task to understand more about how social media can offer ways for voices to challenge ideologies from below, needs to explore the ideas of ‘nodes’. Right wing populism in the west: Social media discourse and echo chambers. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/majid_khosravinik/publications) and ‘echo chambers’ in greater detail. Though #MeToo did provide an ideological challenge, I show how it is also discursively chaotic and partly driven by influencers who (...) may have a range of other motivations to align with the moral capital in the feed. At another level, #MeToo is highly nodal in terms of affect and moral conviction. These features can be understood in regard to nodal power of affective connectivity. Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19, 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697) and also in terms of major shifts in accepted norms of debating politics and society driven by social media. I consider what this means for CDS in relation to identifying discourses and discovering ideology in the social media landscape. (shrink)

While there is an increasing focus on the use of online networks among autistic users, how autistic adults communicate in social networking sites remains underexplored. The article puts forward an argument for combining systematic observation of digital practices with analysis of evaluative language in order to provide a situated account of ‘autistic sociality’ in social media. Drawing on practice-based theories of social media affordances and discourse analysis research on online self-presentation and affiliation we show how autistic Twitter users rely on (...) association, content persistence and editability in order to signal social engagement through different forms of interaction and alignment. We discuss how the proposed framework can provide a new perspective on communicative practices of autistic social media users and advance development of inclusive digital networking platforms. (shrink)

Covid-19 has occasioned ongoing shifts in discourse as language changes to reflect and shape new stages of the global pandemic and different voices weigh in on topics, such as infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy. This study looks at an instance of this that relates to the ‘global education industry’, where cancellation of the International Baccalaureate’s May 2020 high stakes examination instigated a wide-ranging discussion about the organisation. This was triggered by the publication of IB results for 174,355 students in 146 (...) countries, many of which showed large discrepancies between predicted and final grades. Using computer-assisted discourse analysis and a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #ibscandal, patterns of language use are analysed, providing valuable new insights into the impact on students in different national contexts. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological approach to the study of discourses in the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013). The hybrid media system is defined as a new type of system in which traditional and emerging media are assembled, changed and flow gradually to create new forms. One form of hybridization is the relationship between social networks and television, in which both media model and build each other. Various studies (Gruber, 2017; Vaccari et al., 2016) have demonstrated the importance of the (...) study of hybrid media system to explore the construction of meanings in new media contexts, especially in political contexts. This study is part of a qualitative paradigm that incorporates the principles of critical discourse analysis for the analysis of semiotic resources used in 30,000 tweets with hashtags of five Chilean political television programs broadcast during 2016, which promote online public debate and participation. Based on the analysis of online texts and television programs, it was established that the argumentative strategies and resources used constituted an expansion of the televised political debate and a space for interaction of social network users with traditional media. The decision to directly involve these users in television programs has implications for the understanding of the symbolic limits of the policy. The inclusion of new actors has the potential to model the quality of debate and argumentation in the digitally mediated public sphere. (shrink)

In this study, I examine the online discourse of the European refugee crisis on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, I analyze 100 tweets that include #refugeesnotwelcome, and explore how this hashtag is used to express negative feelings, beliefs and ideologies toward refugees and migrants in Europe. Guided by critical discourse studies, I focus on Twitter users’ discursive strategies as well as form and function of semiotic resources and multimodality. Twitter users who include this particular hashtag use a rhetoric of inclusion (...) and exclusion to depict refugees as unwanted, criminal outsiders. These tendencies align with current trends in Europe where nationalist-conservative and xenophobic right-wing groups gain power and establish a socially accepted discourse of racism. (shrink)

This paper investigates the use of hashtags in the building of brand narratives (i.e. the open-ended, unfolding and participative depiction of a company’s core ideology and beliefs). A collection of over 700 hashtags involved in the creation of the advertising narratives of the four leading soft drinks brands in 2017 (i.e.Coca-Cola, Pepsi, RedBull, Nescafé) has been analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively to unveil their functions and formal characteristics, as well as the cognitive processes that underlie their interpretation and operate on (...) the framing and dissemination of brand narratives. Ultimately, by categorizing and explaining the roles of hashtags in the construction of a brand narrative, as well as the potential correlations between their formal and functional traits and their retweeting rate and digital lifespan, this paper shapes a preliminary description of the characteristics of the subgenre of hashtag-based brand narratives and spells out some of the factors that should be considered in the choice of hashtags for advertising purposes. (shrink)

This study tackles hashtags as framing devices which shape public arguments and controversies in computer-mediated communication environments. It focuses on the use of the _genocide_ hashtag on Twitter in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. It proposes and showcases a methodology to surface how the semantic and discourse properties of the term genocide affect its framing properties as a hashtag which bears argumentative functions, directly or indirectly calling for action.

Political discourse relies heavily on specific discursive strategies to gain, exercise and sustain power. Among those are metaphors which have the power to persuade and the potential to carry certa...

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)

This article examines online identity practices of Chinese doctors mediated through borrowed linguistic resources in a leading medical app. Setting against rapid societal changes in China which open up traditionally ‘powerful’ professions to market competition, and the development of a booming digital economy, this app and its semiotic work drawing on Chinese Internet vernacular, I will argue, offer a fascinating lens to probe into the highly dynamic online discursive practices in contemporary China. Drawing on the notions of entextualization and resemiotization, (...) I will trace and analyse the patterned ways in which pre-existing linguistic resources are creatively reworked by the app to achieve new identity-making purposes. Situating the changes of the field of healthcare in China within a worldwide shift towards neoliberal ideologies and practices, I will also briefly discuss how the emergence of such new social space in digital settings may impact the production and communication of health knowledge and services in China. (shrink)

John Swales’ 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White’s 2004 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited’ was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has (...) emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. (shrink)