Discourse Context & Media最新文献

In this paper, I draw on identity theories as developed within social psychology in general, and Positioning Theory in particular, to investigate the discursive strategies that Tunisian Facebookers use to counter collective face threat, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis in-group and out-group members. To categorize the strategies, a post-data collection taxonomy was developed, which allowed for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the comments. Wherever appropriate, the analysis also considered the range of multimodal semiotic means the commentators used to communicate their emotional stances. Results show that Tunisian Facebook users positioned themselves in multiple ways following face threat, and that their perceptions of their and others’ rights and duties resulted in various discursive positioning moves. Results also show that Tunisian Facebookers used linguistic as well as multimodal resources to convey their emotions. Previous intracultural findings about lexemic and interactional aspects of Tunisian face seem to be relevant for intercultural digital communication involving Tunisians as findings of this study illustrate the influence of cultural values on online face concerns and show the importance of considering the wider offline context when accounting for digital discursive practices.

This paper suggests that LGBTQI representation in The Times does more than simply construct queer subjects. Rather, by representing a sexualised Other, the language of The Times necessarily indexes the presence of an unmarked heterosexual population. Moreover, while LGBTQI people have historically been criminalised and discriminated against, a comparison between two historical corpora (1957–1967 and 1979–1990) demonstrates that The Times has consistently used language to suggest that the heterosexual population is, in fact, vulnerable to the threat of non-normative desire and sexual practices.

By considering which key phrases and collocations are consistent between the two corpora, it is revealed that the verb spread is used to position heterosexual people as vulnerable to both ‘homosexual conduct’ in the 1960s and the threat of HIV infection in the 1980s. This is significant because of the considerable influence broadsheet newspapers like The Times had on British public discourse during the latter half of the twentieth century. In order to frame the discussion, the analysis is supported by the theories of radical contingency and radical historicity (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). The former posits that subject positions are necessarily constituted by what they are not while the latter posits that subjectivities available to us in the present are always the result of political processes from the past. The social ontology of discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) therefore provides a lens through which to interpret what diachronic newspaper data reveals about how British social attitudes were changing or staying the same during this time.

Nowadays, the integration of informal, evaluative and entertaining elements in news production is not an uncommon practice in certain types of news genres. Our focus is on such elements expressed innovatively through image-based digital resources (IDRs) borrowed from participatory internet media culture, which include internet memes, emojis, screenshots of TV dramas/movies and digital archives, in social media news reporting. Our case study deals with news reports about sexual assaults by a Chinese official news outlet People.cn on Sina Weibo, one of the largest social media platforms in mainland China. Using the concepts of ‘remediatisation’ and ‘media interdiscursivity’, we unpack the ideological implications of the representation of sexual assaults and the social actors (perpetrators and victims) involved in the cases. Our study shows that the unexpected and innovative use of IDRs by the news media generates particular kinds of affect that result in an ideological ambivalence about sexual assaults and sexual crime reporting.

Online parenting forums are popular sources of information about childhood vaccinations, but vaccination discussions, especially online, are often polarised and polarising (Jenkins & Moreno 2020). This can have very real implications for ultimate vaccination decisions (Al-Hasan et al., 2021). Among the most visited parenting forums in the UK is Mumsnet Talk, hosted on the parenting website Mumsnet, which has a reputation for being straight-talking and combative. This supposedly applies particularly to its most popular Talk Topic, Am I being unreasonable?’ (AIBU), which also includes numerous threads related to vaccinations.

In this paper we combine corpus-based methods with qualitative discourse analysis to examine over 6-million words of vaccination-related discussions on 895 threads on AIBU from the inception of Mumsnet in 2000 to May 2021. We provide evidence of a greater presence of confrontation-related language in these threads when compared with similar threads not on AIBU, zooming in on nine keywords that can be used as insults (e.g. ‘idiot’ and ‘bitch’). The use of these keywords reveals the multiple types of conflict at play, including between people with opposing and similar vaccine stances. While some insults are directed at each other within the forum, the majority are directed at external third parties, often the protagonists at the heart of offline conflicts detailed in the original post of an AIBU thread. We show that, although these insults perform impoliteness towards external third parties potentially perpetuating conflict that predates any posting on the forum, they simultaneously have a supportive and community enhancing function within the threads. We reflect on the implications of our findings for the role of AIBU as a point of reference and site of interaction for parents facing vaccination-related issues and decisions.

To date, little attention has been paid to how producers of digital media complicate notions of participation and audience in digital media. Taking the work of user experience (UX) writers as a case study, I offer an analytic framework for approaching the conceptual challenges that come with this. The empirical focus of my analysis is an emblematic example of UX writers’ work: the ubiquitous microcopy (i.e. user interface texts) produced for cookie consent notices. Orienting to Jones’s (2020b) work on digital and algorithmic pragmatics, I demonstrate how these “little texts” act in ways which are both agentful and influential. More than a matter of implicit audience design (Bell, 1984), UX writers actively use the affordances of software interfaces for inventing, stylizing, and crafting an audience. It is through this strategic stylizing of users that UX writers produce what Bakhtin (1986) calls a superaddressee. By positioning users in particular ways – and in particular moments – these little, seemingly inconsequential texts of digital media can thus effectively exercise a form of symbolic violence.

Recent large-scale surveys of social media have repeatedly shown that Facebook and Twitter are losing popularity amongst teenagers, with newer ‘image-first’ apps such as Snapchat and Instagram becoming preferred amongst this demographic. Whilst there is a wealth of research which has examined more general reasons for this shift, it is unclear to what extent these explanations can account for more local level user practices. This article interrogates these issues by taking an ethnographic approach to examine prevalent discourses of social media amongst young people in an East London youth group. Specifically, I explore the ways in which social media apps and platforms are discursively represented by the young people with reference to their everyday lives. This leads me to argue that whilst some of their practices can be accounted for by broader trends of social media use, issues that reflect the lived realities of the young people (e.g., crime, social networks) equally influence their engagements with different platforms.