Discourse and Social Media

Gwen Bouvier, Gwen Bouvier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317276999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discourse and Social Media is a unique and timely collection that breaks ground on how discourse scholars, coming from a range of disciplinary perspectives, can critically analyse different social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and News. The book fills a gap in the market for a multi-disciplinary collection for analysing the discourse of social media.

In providing a thorough review of the field to date, the opening chapter considers some of the common and divergent interests and priorities that exist in social media discourse analysis. It also discusses the wider methodological and theoretical implications which social media analysis brings to the process of discourse analysis, as new forms of connections and communication call us to re-think the static models that we have been using. The rest of the collection draws on different traditions in discourse studies, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Foucaultian analysis and Multimodality, to bring several unique approaches to critically analysing social media from a discourse perspective. Each ground-breaking chapter shows how different forms of social media data can best be selected, analysed, and dealt with critically.

As a whole, Discourse and Social Media provides a go-to resource for social media scholars, as well as graduate students. The book is a significant contribution to the development of the field at this present shifting time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses.

What is a discourse approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media: connecting with other academic fields

Gwen Bouvier

College of Communication and Media Studies and Zayed University

The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media despite a number of notable scholarly works. But as yet there has been little that has dealt specifically with issues of multicultural discourse – how language, identity, cross-cultural social relations and power play out in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media. In this paper, I show why discourse studies must engage with theories and empirical work on social media across academic fields beyond discourse studies and linguistics, at how these can help best frame the kinds of research that needs to be done, how to best formulate some of the basic questions of critical discourse analysis for this new communicative environment. I use this as a platform to point to the areas where multicultural discourse studies can work – where all the ambiguities of former studies of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are present, but realised in new ways. Yet these new forms of communication are fused into wider patterns of changing cultural values about forms of social structure, knowledge itself and the kinds of issues that tend to form our individually civic spheres.

Introduction

This special edition of Journal of Multicultural Discourses brings together a set of papers that take different approaches to the study of discourse and social media, with an emphasis on issues of culture and identity. Social media offer new challenges and new possibilities, and create new requirements for the study of multicultural discourses, for which, I want to show, we would be wise to engage across the scholarly work in a number of academic fields in order to help gauge priorities and to place our work well in the landscape of social media research.

The Journal of Multicultural Discourses can play an important role in promoting the role of culture in discourse studies, where social media now provide a site of fundamental shifts in communicative practices, genres and modalities. Such a contribution is important to offset the emphasis on work that tends to focus on the ‘global centres’, driven partly by the way that networks have tended to be driven by Anglo-American and English language academic publishing (Larsson 2009) with the consequent definitions of theories, concepts and prioritised topics (Shi 2013). The journal has aimed to foreground studies which help us to understand the ways in which different cultural communities interact differently, in terms of worldviews, concepts, values, rules, strategies, means, channels, purposes and consequences. And in this introduction I want to make the case for why social media provide one central site where we can, and should, carry out this important work. Discourse studies should certainly have more to say about this, especially given the pace of processes of globalisation, where it is important to understand not only these worldviews in themselves but also the ways in which these interact and are in transformation. Social media are part of this, now fused into the fabric of everyday life, providing new possibilities for intercontinental communication, new ways of maintaining, creating, or imagining cultural communities and identities, and new ways of combining more locally nuanced ideas, values and identities (Shi 2014).

Social media, globalisation and culture

Blommaert (2010, 1) pointed out that globalisation does not lead to a ‘global village’ but to a complex web of parts, interconnected in different ways and to different degrees. And with new forms of connections and communication possible through social media, this transformation calls us also to re-think the static models that we have been using. For Blommaert, it calls for a whole new vocabulary and new kinds of arguments to explain what we are seeing. Multicultural discourse studies needs to study social media to look at these more or less interconnected parts, at the way that ideas and values are shared or not shared, and consider the linguistic tools and modes deployed to do so. And importantly, it needs to engage with the wider issue of power. We live in a world dominated by some key kinds of power relations, specifically with the continued dominance and global spread of free-market capitalism. What may not be so important is how and if people are different, but the nature of the wider power relations that they inhabit and how these may be influenced by shifts in the communications landscape. In this world where social media are fused into everyday lives, this is a crucial part of this study, but which demands new ways of thinking. Later in this introduction I want to return to the kinds of power interests scholars identify as driving social media platforms.

Globalisation has also brought population shifts and migration, although it is often the migrant wage labourers who are the least rewarded by these shifts. These too involve issues of intercultural communication, as migrants use social media to link with more established migrants and foster new ties, which can aid and make the whole process much easier (Dekker & Engbersen 2014) and faster, while at the same time providing an ‘ambient’ sense of home (Komito 2011, 1075). Charmarkeh (2013) shows how Somali refugees used Facebook in cybercafes to maintain contacts with other refugees met while in transit countries, and also to seek out contacts and romantic connections once in Europe. It has also been shown how diasporic social media groups can become highly radicalised and xenophobic (Conversi 2012). But migration can also create a situation in which existing citizens feel there is need to compete for material and symbolic resources (van Dijk 1996), sometimes leading to surges in interest in far right parties. But overall, these too involve interplays of worldviews, values and concepts, yet are played out under the dominant system of the ideology of neoliberalism, where concerns and fears are ‘shared’ and ‘liked’ through the social media embedded in the lives of the participants (Correa et al. 2010).

Castells (2000, 3) once argued that in a world of cross-national media flows, where former institutions break down, the search for identity becomes a key source of social meaning. And it seems that for many, as Livingstone (2008) suggests, creating and networking online content is becoming an integral means of managing one’s identity, lifestyle and social relations. Some theorise the very use of sites as fundamentally performative acts (Cover 2012). Social media are one place where we can study just how this plays out. Particularly, as some scholars have argued, this has been accompanied with massive shifts in what people present about themselves for public knowledge (Nussbaum 2007). And certainly what is clear from studies of social media is that it is used for a combination of identity construction, the maintenance of social relationships and also to engage with more socially relevant matters. All of the papers in this special edition, despite their wide range of interests and theoretical approaches, point to such combinations.

Social media and cross-cultural sharing

De Zuniga et al. (2012) argue that the growing popularity of social media has created a debate: Do these Internet services contribute to society by allowing people to become informed, find common causes and participate in public life more often (e.g. Bennett 2008)? In this sense, is there a place for greater cross-cultural sharing? Or do they foster shallower relationships, distract people from public affairs and deepen their political and civic disengagement (e.g. Hodgkinson 2008)? As such, do social media lead to increasingly disengaged and insular forms of ideas, values, concepts, worldviews and means of realising these? Social media are social, but only in an immediate sense. The works of Lindgren (2010) and Georgakopoulou (2014) suggest that discussions of socio-political issues online do not deal with actual details but rather seek to frame events into pre-existing personal interests and alignments. Some scholars are more optimistic. Hilbert (2009) argues that people may well use social media for personal identity construction, but they may still use, contribute and share information that has civic relevance. It is to this kind of debate that two papers in this collection, by Way, in his study of YouTube posts about political protests in Turkey, and by Thulfiqar, about political views on Facebook in Iraq, make less than optimistic contributions.

Social theorists make some important observations about the wider shifts that online interactions may both be part of and a symptom of. Žižek (1997) pointed to his concerns that language in forums and blogs ceases to be ‘subjectivized’. Simply by this he meant that users of a forum do not have to stand by what they say. They can intervene and then disappear, and can simply unhook if they do not like a response or want to escape the consequences of what they have said. An exit from social media is always just a click away. Users can leave a harsh comment and then come back several days later to see its effects. Dean (2010) points to the way that this can lead to discussion threads quickly disintegrating. Members unsubscribe, feeling attacked and embarrassed. The imbalance between participants and lurkers, who may appear suddenly, in threaded discussions can also add to this problem. In fact, Johnson (2001, 143) argues that when you consider the proportions of lurkers to discussants in a particular forum it is in fact less interactive than a face-to-face lecture and much less so than a conversation around a dinner table. In the light of Blommaert’s (2010) comments about the need for discourse studies to adapt, are new approaches and tools needed to deal with these changes?

Dean (2010) adds a further point as regards this tendency to find snark comments on social media forums. She suggests that the Internet, the culture of engagement, of participation and of scan-and-go, has generated scepticism. This can be traced to the collapse of a sense of the ‘big other’, as Žižek (1997) would describe it, in other words a waning of the force of a central, forceful and institutional body of knowledge and is commonly agreed upon, or at least enforced, ideas, values and identities. Hardt and Negri (2000) saw this decline as resulting in a shift from a culture defined by the role of the citizen subject with more determined identifications to a culture that continually offers new ways to imagine ourselves. Dean (2010, 5) refers to this new situation as the culture of ‘communicative capitalism’. In sum, a decline of ‘the symbolic’, or ‘the decline of symbolic efficiency’, to use Žižek’s exact words, leaves a gap into which the images and effects of social media can be poured (Dean 2010, 5). On the one hand, this leads to a shift of more specialist kinds of forums and online spaces, often with their own more specialist language and terms that can easily exclude, annoy and confuse the outsider. On the other hand, Myers (2010) shows that successful blogs simply should have such specialist language as part of signalling a community of shared interest. Downey and Fenton (2003) point to a trend whereby political activist sites on social media can easily become radical, inhospitable ghettos. In this sense, much is to be established in a discursive sense as regards social media groupings, where more localised identities, ideas and values are celebrated as regards how esoteric there are. I will consider the research implications for such issues shortly. But clearly, this marks a requirement for the new kinds of approaches and tools, to which Blommaert refers, as we shift away from either highly personalised or mass media-based texts. And it also raises the question as to whether such shifts so adequately apply cross-culturally. Do the arguments of Žižek and others apply so well in cultures with very different histories, ideas and values? Are these ‘symbolic gaps’ of the same order?

For Dean (2010), the decline of the symbolic has a further consequence which may have great relevance for intercultural communication through social media. She suggests that along with the demise of central authoritative ideas and identities that the Internet with its culture of engagement, of participation and of scan-and-go has generated scepticism. This scepticism means that users tend to regard comments always as opinion and not as information, which in turn means that we tend not to engage in receptive discussion but fall back on what is comfortable. All else is just opinion. And this too chimes with the kinds of wider changes observed by sociologists where there has been a shift to placing emphasis on the personal-as-political and where this is realised in a world where everything is supposed to be rewarding (Chaney 1996). Studies of the discourses in forum posts about important civic issues such as shootings in schools (Lindgren 2012) or pressing political events such as the economic crisis in Greece (Georgakopoulou 2014) become, rather, launch pads for existing views on gun control or xenophobic ideas about Germans. There was little evidence of receptivity. In this collection, the papers by Way and by Rasmussen both allow us to think a little more about these processes in very different contexts and on different social media platforms.

Understanding multicultural discourse now means, in part, acknowledging that acts of communication take place in these broader changes. Coupland (2010) pointed out that it was time for linguistics to engage with such wider forces sweeping the planet. Globalisations, shifts in technologies and forms of communication are all interlinked. While discourse analysts have skills specialist for closer analysis, the details found at this level will be shaped by the macro. And, crucially, this whole is driven by the forces of global consumer capitalism. I say a little more about this that follows, and why social media may tie into this in quite specific ways. It has been the case that discourse analysts have been less strong in connecting to these larger matters, such as the political economy of the media.

The political economy of social media

Early studies of the Internet were extremely optimistic, associating it with the liberation of the voice of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. What is a discourse approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media: connecting with other academic fields
• 2. The pursuit of power in Iraqi political discourse: unpacking the construction of sociopolitical communities on Facebook
• 3. YouTube as a site of debate through populist politics: the case of a Turkish protest pop video
• 4. ‘Should each of us take over the role as watcher?’ Attitudes on Twitter towards the 2014 Norwegian terror alert
• 5. Radicalist discourse: a study of the stances of Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Somalia’s Al Shabaab on Twitter
• 6. Visual forms of address in social media discourse: the case of a science communication website
• 7. Food fight: conflicting language ideologies in English and French news and social media
• Index