Pub Date : 2025-02-22DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100868
Wenjuan Xu , Xingsong Shi
This study aims to examine how multimodal interactional metadiscourse are used for CSR communication on Chinese companies’ websites. The corpus consists of 153 CSR webpages presented by 30 leading Chinese energy, metal, equipment, and chemistry companies on their English websites. The results indicate that the CSR webpages are rich in interactional metadiscourse devices, with engagement markers and attitude markers being the most salient ones. A variety of non-textual markers, such as pictures, videos, company logos, icons, facial expressions, interaction-initiating resources, are deployed along with textual markers to achieve the promotional and persuasive purposes of the genre. The results reveal the characteristics of employing digital media for business communication, adding more interactivity, visibility, and creativity in the construction of CSR discourse. The study may enrich business discourse literature by introducing a multimodal framework to explore interpersonal resources used in digital business genres.
{"title":"The use of multimodal interactional metadiscourse for CSR communication on Chinese companies’ corporate websites","authors":"Wenjuan Xu , Xingsong Shi","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100868","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100868","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study aims to examine how multimodal interactional metadiscourse are used for CSR communication on Chinese companies’ websites. The corpus consists of 153 CSR webpages presented by 30 leading Chinese energy, metal, equipment, and chemistry companies on their English websites. The results indicate that the CSR webpages are rich in interactional metadiscourse devices, with engagement markers and attitude markers being the most salient ones. A variety of non-textual markers, such as pictures, videos, company logos, icons, facial expressions, interaction-initiating resources, are deployed along with textual markers to achieve the promotional and persuasive purposes of the genre. The results reveal the characteristics of employing digital media for business communication, adding more interactivity, visibility, and creativity in the construction of CSR discourse. The study may enrich business discourse literature by introducing a multimodal framework to explore interpersonal resources used in digital business genres.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 100868"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143464653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-21DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100866
David Machin , Per Ledin , Wenting Zhao
Using the case of nutrition influencers on Chinese Weibo, this paper considers how social media platforms shape knowledge production and the representation of expertise. It is known that members of the public now mainly obtain information about health, illness on social media, chiefly through social media influencers. This creates concern for health professionals, given that such information tends to be highly misleading. Here we use multimodal critical discourse analysis, to analyse a sample of Weibo hashtags, to learn more about, not so much how this knowledge is incorrect, but how social media platforms themselves foster forms of knowledge where accuracy and clarity of knowledge in relation to details of issues, objectives and causalities is not favoured. We find a form of faux-expertise, which is legitimized through vaguer small stories about everyday life where the solutions presented are absent of clear problem-identification and of causal connections. We ask what this means as social media platforms become colonized ways of sharing and engaging with all forms of knowledge in our societies.
{"title":"How the nature of social media platforms supports faulty knowledge production by influencers: The case of nutrition guidance for mothers on Chinese social media","authors":"David Machin , Per Ledin , Wenting Zhao","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100866","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100866","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using the case of nutrition influencers on Chinese Weibo, this paper considers how social media platforms shape knowledge production and the representation of expertise. It is known that members of the public now mainly obtain information about health, illness on social media, chiefly through social media influencers. This creates concern for health professionals, given that such information tends to be highly misleading. Here we use multimodal critical discourse analysis, to analyse a sample of Weibo hashtags, to learn more about, not so much how this knowledge is incorrect, but how social media platforms themselves foster forms of knowledge where accuracy and clarity of knowledge in relation to details of issues, objectives and causalities is not favoured. We find a form of faux-expertise, which is legitimized through vaguer small stories about everyday life where the solutions presented are absent of clear problem-identification and of causal connections. We ask what this means as social media platforms become colonized ways of sharing and engaging with all forms of knowledge in our societies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 100866"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143454073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-20DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100862
Ursula Lutzky , Mhairi Rundell
Today companies are encouraged to communicate with a sense of humour when interacting with stakeholders online, and they increasingly take sides on contested issues by engaging in corporate social advocacy. While both approaches to digital business discourse may have benefits, they may equally polarize. This study explores the use of a digital discourse strategy that combines using humour with taking part in socio-political debates to find out to what extent their combination fuels polarization and entails negative outcomes. Using a corpus linguistic methodology, this study explores a 4.5-million-word corpus of tweets posted by and addressed to the budget airline Ryanair between October 2020 and March 2023, when the airline increasingly used aggressive humour and took a stance on socio-political issues in its posts. The findings show that the topics Ryanair engaged with, often in a humorous manner, entailed heated discussions on Twitter, with several words pertaining to the respective topics being key in the corpus. At the same time, they resulted in dividing its client base, with some stakeholders explicitly expressing their appreciation of its discursive approach and others deploring it. While humour may thus enhance the polarizing effect of corporate social advocacy, it may also lead to increased user engagement with stakeholders frequently commenting on and talking about brand posts. Ultimately, the success of a company’s digital discourse strategy will be influenced by the interplay between its brand identity, the context of communication and the specific type of user engagement behaviour it intends to spark.
{"title":"“Mocking people for stupid opinions is not fun. Also it’s bad for business.” From using humour for webcare to polarization","authors":"Ursula Lutzky , Mhairi Rundell","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100862","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100862","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Today companies are encouraged to communicate with a sense of humour when interacting with stakeholders online, and they increasingly take sides on contested issues by engaging in corporate social advocacy. While both approaches to digital business discourse may have benefits, they may equally polarize. This study explores the use of a digital discourse strategy that combines using humour with taking part in socio-political debates to find out to what extent their combination fuels polarization and entails negative outcomes. Using a corpus linguistic methodology, this study explores a 4.5-million-word corpus of tweets posted by and addressed to the budget airline Ryanair between October 2020 and March 2023, when the airline increasingly used aggressive humour and took a stance on socio-political issues in its posts. The findings show that the topics Ryanair engaged with, often in a humorous manner, entailed heated discussions on Twitter, with several words pertaining to the respective topics being key in the corpus. At the same time, they resulted in dividing its client base, with some stakeholders explicitly expressing their appreciation of its discursive approach and others deploring it. While humour may thus enhance the polarizing effect of corporate social advocacy, it may also lead to increased user engagement with stakeholders frequently commenting on and talking about brand posts. Ultimately, the success of a company’s digital discourse strategy will be influenced by the interplay between its brand identity, the context of communication and the specific type of user engagement behaviour it intends to spark.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 100862"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143454072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-09DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100867
Gwen Bouvier, Shangran Jin
Social media platforms now play a major role in how societies debate social and political issues. Yet scholars have shown concern in regard to how the affordances of social media give form to such debate, shaping not only how we interact and engage with ideas, but also the very nature of the ideas themselves, notably where nuance becomes difficult and where bolder statements and shows of emotion are favored. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we consider a trending feed from X in 2022, centred on the hashtag #MahsaAmini, which carried images of women cutting their hair in response to the death of a young woman in Iran at the hands of the security police. We reveal how the hashtag represents the highly complex situation in Iran through buzzwords and symbolism, and an ethnocentric discourse of gender empowerment. We explore how the affordances of social media as a material of communication have formed canons of use, or standardized social practices for social protest, where clear detail and purpose is lost behind collective moral display. Given that such hashtags can now have a leading role in agenda setting, this has consequences for the kinds of social and political discourses that come to occupy public space.
{"title":"Social media and the new canon of use for social protest: The case of cutting hair to show solidarity with the women of Iran","authors":"Gwen Bouvier, Shangran Jin","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100867","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100867","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Social media platforms now play a major role in how societies debate social and political issues. Yet scholars have shown concern in regard to how the affordances of social media give form to such debate, shaping not only how we interact and engage with ideas, but also the very nature of the ideas themselves, notably where nuance becomes difficult and where bolder statements and shows of emotion are favored. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we consider a trending feed from X in 2022, centred on the hashtag #MahsaAmini, which carried images of women cutting their hair in response to the death of a young woman in Iran at the hands of the security police. We reveal how the hashtag represents the highly complex situation in Iran through buzzwords and symbolism, and an ethnocentric discourse of gender empowerment. We explore how the affordances of social media as a material of communication have formed canons of use, or standardized social practices for social protest, where clear detail and purpose is lost behind collective moral display. Given that such hashtags can now have a leading role in agenda setting, this has consequences for the kinds of social and political discourses that come to occupy public space.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"64 ","pages":"Article 100867"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143372226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-01DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100848
Holly Lopez, Sandra Kübler
One of the challenges for automated abusive language detection is combating unintended bias, which can be easily introduced through the annotation process, especially when what is (not) considered abusive is subjective and heavily context dependent. Our study incorporates a fine-grained, socio-pragmatic perspective to data modeling by taking into consideration contextual elements that impact the quality of abusive language corpora. We use a fine-grained annotation scheme that distinguishes between different types of non-abuse along with explicit and implicit abuse. We include the following non-abusive categories: meta, casual profanity, argumentative language, irony, and non-abusive language. Experts and minimally trained annotators use this scheme to manually re-annotate instances originally considered abusive by crowdsourced annotators in a standard corpus. After re-annotation, we investigate discrepancies between experts and minimally trained annotators. Our investigation shows that minimally trained annotators have difficulty interpreting contextual aspects and distinguishing between content performing abuse and content about abuse or instances of casual profanity. It also demonstrates how missing information or contextualization cues are often a source of disagreement across all types of annotators and poses a significant challenge for developing robust, nuanced corpora and annotation guidelines for abusive language detection.
{"title":"Context in abusive language detection: On the interdependence of context and annotation of user comments","authors":"Holly Lopez, Sandra Kübler","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100848","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100848","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>One of the challenges for automated abusive language detection is combating unintended bias, which can be easily introduced through the annotation process, especially when what is (not) considered abusive is subjective and heavily context dependent. Our study incorporates a fine-grained, socio-pragmatic perspective to data modeling by taking into consideration contextual elements that impact the quality of abusive language corpora. We use a fine-grained annotation scheme that distinguishes between different types of non-abuse along with explicit and implicit abuse. We include the following non-abusive categories: meta, casual profanity, argumentative language, irony, and non-abusive language. Experts and minimally trained annotators use this scheme to manually re-annotate instances originally considered abusive by crowdsourced annotators in a standard corpus. After re-annotation, we investigate discrepancies between experts and minimally trained annotators. Our investigation shows that minimally trained annotators have difficulty interpreting contextual aspects and distinguishing between content performing abuse and content about abuse or instances of casual profanity. It also demonstrates how missing information or contextualization cues are often a source of disagreement across all types of annotators and poses a significant challenge for developing robust, nuanced corpora and annotation guidelines for abusive language detection.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 100848"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-01DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100821
Susan C. Herring, Ashley R. Dainas
Reciprocal conversational interaction is seemingly a logical impossibility on the asynchronous short-form video platform TikTok. Yet users overcome the constraints and affordances of the platform to create the appearance of synchronous interaction by co-opting the duet feature, which allows users to respond to a previously recorded video, generating a new video in which the original video (OV) and the response video (RV) are displayed side by side. We examine how TikTok duetters create the illusion of conversing together in real time by applying conversation analysis methods to a judgment sample of TikTok duets, with a focus on strategies of turn-taking and overlapping. OVs and RVs collaborate to various extents in co-constructing duet conversations; OVs by explicitly or implicitly inviting duets, and RVs by orienting to OVs through the positioning and timing of their responses. Through these interactional dynamics, duetters performatively evoke participant roles, personae, and situational contexts, while simultaneously pursuing broader communicative goals of entertaining and growing an audience of followers.
{"title":"Improbable conversations: Interactional dynamics in TikTok duets","authors":"Susan C. Herring, Ashley R. Dainas","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100821","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100821","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Reciprocal conversational interaction is seemingly a logical impossibility on the asynchronous short-form video platform TikTok. Yet users overcome the constraints and affordances of the platform to create the appearance of synchronous interaction by co-opting the <em>duet</em> feature, which allows users to respond to a previously recorded video, generating a new video in which the original video (OV) and the response video (RV) are displayed side by side. We examine how TikTok duetters create the illusion of conversing together in real time by applying conversation analysis methods to a judgment sample of TikTok duets, with a focus on strategies of turn-taking and overlapping. OVs and RVs collaborate to various extents in co-constructing duet conversations; OVs by explicitly or implicitly inviting duets, and RVs by orienting to OVs through the positioning and timing of their responses. Through these interactional dynamics, duetters performatively evoke participant roles, personae, and situational contexts, while simultaneously pursuing broader communicative goals of entertaining and growing an audience of followers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 100821"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-01DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100838
Andrew S. Ross , Aditi Bhatia
As a centuries-old discursive practice, confessional acts that are typically understood as an acceptance of one’s guilt or shame regarding a particular action or thought, have been observed and studied in various contexts including religion, law and crime, and medicine. However, the nature and practice of confessions have been increasingly reconfigured within newer, evolving digital media contexts. Social media platforms, such as X (formerly Twitter), have afforded users diverse ways to interact and engage in self-presentation online. The growing need to build and be part of communities, as well as reconceptualised notions of trust, intimacy and authenticity online, facilitated by mechanics of social media platforms and user anonymity have altered conventional notions of confession and absolution. This paper explores the reconfiguration of confessional acts by analysing a corpus of posts submitted to the X account @fesshole, which solicits confessions from its community of followers in a non-institutional, public online context. We analyse the posts by borrowing from van Dijk’s (2015) socio-cognitive model for analysis of discourse, which focuses on the micro and macro levels on which cognition mediates in terms of socially shared norms and ideologies within and across discursive communities. The results of the analysis suggest that X users establish rapport through confessions of an intra- and interpersonal nature about topics of varying degrees of seriousness and in ways that give the ambient online audience something to relate to and connect with. In doing so, confessors seek to bond in place of absolution, and they offer inspiration or commonality in place of guilt.
{"title":"@Fesshole and the discourse of confession on X: A study of online sharing and community building","authors":"Andrew S. Ross , Aditi Bhatia","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100838","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100838","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As a centuries-old discursive practice, confessional acts that are typically understood as an acceptance of one’s guilt or shame regarding a particular action or thought, have been observed and studied in various contexts including religion, law and crime, and medicine. However, the nature and practice of confessions have been increasingly reconfigured within newer, evolving digital media contexts. Social media platforms, such as X (formerly Twitter), have afforded users diverse ways to interact and engage in self-presentation online. The growing need to build and be part of communities, as well as reconceptualised notions of trust, intimacy and authenticity online, facilitated by mechanics of social media platforms and user anonymity have altered conventional notions of confession and absolution. This paper explores the reconfiguration of confessional acts by analysing a corpus of posts submitted to the X account @fesshole, which solicits confessions from its community of followers in a non-institutional, public online context. We analyse the posts by borrowing from van Dijk’s (2015) socio-cognitive model<!--> <!-->for analysis of discourse, which focuses on the micro and macro levels on which cognition mediates in terms of socially shared norms and ideologies within and across discursive communities. The results of the analysis suggest that X users establish rapport through confessions of an intra- and interpersonal nature about topics of varying degrees of seriousness and in ways that give the ambient online audience something to relate to and connect with. In doing so, confessors seek to bond in place of absolution, and they offer inspiration or commonality in place of guilt.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 100838"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143163074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-01DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100837
Xinyu Li, Mie Hiramoto
This study employs the theoretical approaches of stance and indexicality to investigate female fans’ address practices regarding male Chinese pop idols in the fans’ posts on Sina Weibo. Some address terms echo traditional heteronormative romantic paradigms (e.g., husband (idol)–wife (fan)) or non-romantic familial bonds (e.g., son (idol)–mother (fan)). Other address terms subvert traditional gender roles and relationships through unorthodox uses, which still evoke intimacy by placing the male idols in a female position in imagined relationships (e.g., wife (idol)–husband (fan), daughter (idol)–mother (fan)). Theoretically, this study contributes to the theorisation of stance by proposing a specific type of second stancetaker ‘collective ingroup stance subject’ that is a broad audience sharing the same stance as the first stance subject.
{"title":"Address terms in Chinese popular music fandom: Exploring stancetaking in social media discourses","authors":"Xinyu Li, Mie Hiramoto","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100837","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100837","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study employs the theoretical approaches of stance and indexicality to investigate female fans’ address practices regarding male Chinese pop idols in the fans’ posts on Sina Weibo. Some address terms echo traditional heteronormative romantic paradigms (e.g., husband (idol)–wife (fan)) or non-romantic familial bonds (e.g., son (idol)–mother (fan)). Other address terms subvert traditional gender roles and relationships through unorthodox uses, which still evoke intimacy by placing the male idols in a female position in imagined relationships (e.g., wife (idol)–husband (fan), daughter (idol)–mother (fan)). Theoretically, this study contributes to the theorisation of stance by proposing a specific type of second stancetaker ‘collective ingroup stance subject’ that is a broad audience sharing the same stance as the first stance subject.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 100837"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143163077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-01DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100847
Lauri Heimo , Pertti Alasuutari , Laia Pi Ferrer , Olga Ulybina
The COVID-19 pandemic did not only imply a spread of a virus, it also set in motion a series of global measures and discourses that likewise diffused worldwide. This article explores the global dissemination of knowledge and cross-national comparisons in the context of a global pandemic. We approach the question by analysing coverage of COVID-19 in newspapers published in Australia, Russia, Singapore, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The analysis reveals that the concept of the world uniting against a common enemy, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, was absent from media coverage. Instead, the prevalent discourse centered around competition between states. However, this article argues that this does not imply that the world is divided into distinct cultures with divergent views or understandings of reality. Rather, we argue that the pandemic led to the formation of a discursive field consisting of the reference points that constitute sensible and legitimate ways to discuss potential policies.
{"title":"Evoking ‘other countries’ in media discourses: The case of the Covid-19 pandemic in six countries","authors":"Lauri Heimo , Pertti Alasuutari , Laia Pi Ferrer , Olga Ulybina","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100847","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100847","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 pandemic did not only imply a spread of a virus, it also set in motion a series of global measures and discourses that likewise diffused worldwide. This article explores the global dissemination of knowledge and cross-national comparisons in the context of a global pandemic. We approach the question by analysing coverage of COVID-19 in newspapers published in Australia, Russia, Singapore, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The analysis reveals that the concept of the world uniting against a common enemy, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, was absent from media coverage. Instead, the prevalent discourse centered around competition between states. However, this article argues that this does not imply that the world is divided into distinct cultures with divergent views or understandings of reality. Rather, we argue that the pandemic led to the formation of a discursive field consisting of the reference points that constitute sensible and legitimate ways to discuss potential policies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 100847"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143163075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-02-01DOI: 10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100839
Benedict J.L. Rowlett , Kwan Ting Chung
The proliferation of social networking websites and dating apps has led to new language practices that foster intimacy and inspire romance. While several language studies have examined gay men’s use of dating apps, studies of lesbian dating apps have been scarce, particularly in non-Western contexts. To explore the relationship between digital media and lesbian dating practices in Hong Kong, this study examines how a forum on the social media app Butterfly facilitates the discursive construction and negotiation of Hong Kong lesbian sexual identities, both in users’ self-representations and preferences for desired others. The research uses a mixed method approach rooted in queer linguistics to combine quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of 241 forum posts. The analysis reveals the common use of local identity labels, including relationship role labels such as “Tomboy” (TB) and “Tomboy’s girl” (TBG), along with other identity markers. However, the analysis also reveals users’ preferences for more neutral, or non-gender specific labels in the presentation of their sexual identities and those of their desired others, for example “No label” (NL). This research thus sheds light on how users may be making use of the app’s forum to question established, or more traditional local linguistic markers of gender/sexual identity, indicating queering trends in discourses of Hong Kong lesbian identities.
{"title":"Queer(ing) language practices in a Hong Kong lesbian dating app","authors":"Benedict J.L. Rowlett , Kwan Ting Chung","doi":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100839","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100839","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The proliferation of social networking websites and dating apps has led to new language practices that foster intimacy and inspire romance. While several language studies have examined gay men’s use of dating apps, studies of lesbian dating apps have been scarce, particularly in non-Western contexts. To explore the relationship between digital media and lesbian dating practices in Hong Kong, this study examines how a forum on the social media app <em>Butterfly</em> facilitates the discursive construction and negotiation of Hong Kong lesbian sexual identities, both in users’ self-representations and preferences for desired others. The research uses a mixed method approach rooted in queer linguistics to combine quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of 241 forum posts. The analysis reveals the common use of local identity labels, including relationship role labels such as “Tomboy” (TB) and “Tomboy’s girl” (TBG), along with other identity markers. However, the analysis also reveals users’ preferences for more neutral, or non-gender specific labels in the presentation of their sexual identities and those of their desired others, for example “No label” (NL). This research thus sheds light on how users may be making use of the app’s forum to question established, or more traditional local linguistic markers of gender/sexual identity, indicating queering trends in discourses of Hong Kong lesbian identities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46649,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Context & Media","volume":"63 ","pages":"Article 100839"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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