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Introduction to Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future

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 In Bou-Franch, P. & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich , P. (Eds.) (2018). Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions (pp. 4-22). Palgrave
Macmillan.

Introduction to Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions

Pilar G. Blitvich

Patricia Bou-Franch

The aim of this book is to offer new insights and set future directions for the analysis of

digital discourse. The analysis of digital discourse lies at the intersection of (non)

language resources, society and technology. Therefore, digital researchers can draw on a

range of diverse socially-oriented language disciplines, whose methods and research

tools may be of use in carrying out empirical research. However, some of these methods

and tools may need to be critically assessed and reflectively adapted, and perhaps also

expanded and even combined with others to suitably account for the communicative

practices that occur in the digital world and their embeddedness within the social world

at large. Discourse, in our view, is concerned with “social practice” (Fairclough, 1992,

p. 28) rather than language in use, as it was originally – and more narrowly – conceived

in 1980s-1990s. Therefore, we view discourse analysis as the study of “the ways people

build and manage their social world using various semiotic systems” (Jones, Chik &,

Hafner, 2015, p. 3). Put differently, in our view, digital discourse analysis is concerned

with how multimodal, multisemiotic resources are employed to enact identities,

activities and ideologies in the digital world, as part of a larger social world (Gee,

2005).

The field of digital discourse analysis, variously called computer-mediated discourse,

new media sociolinguistics or language and digital communication, has been discussed

in terms of three waves, since Androutsopoulos (2006), inspired by Herring’s (1996)

foundational work, called for “a shift of focus from medium-related to user-related

patterns of language use” (p. 421). While studies within the first wave contained mainly

descriptive linguistic approaches and were carried out in the 1990s, the 2000s saw the

consolidation of a second wave of computer-mediated discourse studies which brought

into the picture socially-oriented language researchers concerned with linguistic

variability, social diversity, issues of identity and community formation and

maintenance: in sum, a collection of studies more specifically concerned with the study

of digital social practices (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015).

Recent research claims that a third wave should further take into consideration issues of

“translocality”, the complex ways in which diverse local practices come together in

global spaces (Tagg & Seargeant, 2014), “transmediality”, or how users transcend

different media, and should move towards incorporating multimodal analyses of the

sociocultural practices of computer-mediated communication (Androutsopoulos, 2015,

Herring, this volume). Further, Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2016) recently called for

research to develop critical and ethical agendas, thus placing the focus on ideologies

about the media and as enacted, challenged and negotiated in the digital world (Thurlow

& Mroczek, 2011; Thurlow, 2017a).

Thus, the present volume is concerned with current debates on digital practices. More

specifically, these include adapting current paradigms in view of past, present and future

research (section II), looking at how users employ the wealth of multimodal resources

provided by digital technologies (Section III) to get things done and be certain kinds of

people (Section IV), and identifying the ideologies that underpin the construction of

digital texts in the social world (Section V).

When it comes to computer-mediated discourse analysis, before we can offer new

insights and future directions to move the field forward, it is necessary to first look back

and take stock of the work done in the different areas of interest that have emerged over
the past 30+ years. This should help us to consider where we stand and, from here, to

begin to identify trends and areas that deserve further attention. Tracing the

development of the field and indicating future venues for research is precisely one of the

main goals of Susan Herring in her chapter titled The Co-Evolution of Computer-

Mediated Communication and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, which

constitutes section II of this book. The rationale behind her study is that the approach

she developed for the analysis of digital practices known as computer-mediated

discourse analysis (CMDA) was devised for textual interactions. As technologies

evolve, however, research methods and paradigms need to evolve too. Thus, the author

makes the case for a research move truly concerned with multi-semiotic analyses, and

she develops and expands the extant CMDA paradigm to open the way in this direction.

In doing so, Herring reviews technological advances in the field organized around three

historical phases, namely, the phase of pre-Web (stand-alone textual clients)

technologies, Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 technological phases. Each phase is discussed

alongside insights gained from computer-mediated discourse studies that analyzed

digital interactions therein. In doing so, she further traces the evolution of the CMDA

paradigm, as it was modified and expanded to account for the increasing communicative

possibilities of each phase.

Along the same lines as Herring, across the board, key scholars in the field of language

and digital communication (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011; Jones et al., 2015; Herring &

Androutsopoulos, 2015; Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016; Thurlow, 2017a) agree that

text based studies, the traditional focus of analysis, need to move forward by

incorporating other modes of communication. All human communication is multimodal

(Norris 2004) but digital technologies are almost always, and are becoming

increasingly, vastly multimodal by combining writing, images, sounds, and other

semiotic modes. Ignoring this fact in our analyses of digital genre practices makes for

very partial accounts of communication therein. Thus, we should place “the concepts of

multimodality and multisemioticity as central to our current research on language and

digital media” (Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016, p. 3). Consequently, a chapter by

Jewitt (2016) included in the handbook these authors co-edit introduces key concepts

and tools of multimodal analysis that can be of use to scholars of digital

communication, and provides guidance on how to collect and transcribe data and on

how to analyze single modes and carry out analyses across modes.

Multimodality entered linguistics through the groundbreaking work of Kress and Van

Leeuwen in Reading Images (1996) and Multimodal Discourse (2001). Although much

of the work in multimodal discourse analysis (for a comprehensive review see

O’Halloran 2013) has been based on Halliday’s systemic functional theory, combining

approaches to discourse with multimodal frameworks of communication has occupied

center stage in the work of scholars of different persuasions. Among others, Lemke

(2011, 2012) has been at the fore of these efforts by bringing together discourse analysis

and visual semiotics to provide ways of analyzing the interconnecting meaning makings

of discourse and images and looking into hypertextuality and traversals as digital

technology mediated ways of creating meaning. For their part, Bateman and Wildfeuer

(2014), have put forth a framework to reengage with visual communication artefacts,

such as visual narratives, in ways compatible with methods developed for verbal

linguistic artefacts. Taking a step further into other digitally mediated genres, Gee

(2014, p.1) proposed a unified theory of discourse analysis to study “language, games,

science and human action and interaction in the real world and imaginary worlds”. Gee

shows how conversations, avatars (identities), affordances (the functions those identities

allow/restrict us to carry out), situated meaning, as well as the building blocks of syntax
and semantics can be found in the real world as well as in games. Since the world and

games share all these primordial elements, they can be analyzed by using one unified

theory of meaning making. The common thread between language and games, Gee

argues, is their multimodality and ultimate functionality.

Since the main goal of this volume is to explore the advances and new insights in the

rapid changing field of language and digital communication, studies of multimodality

play a central role in it. Four chapters (by Sindoni, Perez-Sabater, Johansson, and Yus)

and a significant part of Herring’s contextualization chapter focus on multimodal issues.

Along similar lines as Gee, Herring also proposes a theory of multimodal CMC that

includes graphical phenomena such as emoji, image memes, and avatars in virtual

worlds, as well as by certain kinds of robots. By doing so, Herring’s proposal extends

the definition of CMC itself as fundamentally multimodal. Since text, audio, and video

CMC have been addressed often in the literature, Herring focuses on three newer

phenomena: communication on interactive multimodal platforms (IMPs); graphical

communication, including avatar-mediated communication (AMC); and robot-mediated

communication (RMC). Moving forward, and to be able to give a proper account of

multimodality in digitally meditated communication, Herring argues that CMC needs to

become highly interdisciplinary. Some of the fields that CMC can draw from are

semiotics, ethnography, human-computer interaction, and human-robot interaction.

Comic books can assist in understanding the relationship between text and image and

scholars may also need to relearn or devise new transcribing methods.

As Herring argues, and multimodal scholars have long held (see Norris, 2004),

transcribing multimodal interaction is often a necessary step prior to analysis.

Therefore, it is necessary to devise new transcribing methods commensurate with the

vast multimodality of digital communication. Sindoni (this volume) presents a

transcription of a conversation on an IMP, a Skype video chat, carried out by the author

herself and one of the students taking part in a research project. Sindoni’s aim is not to

assess both transcriptions comparatively but to understand how students make sense of

the video data and several semiotic modes such as language, proxemics, kinesics, and

gaze patterns. The process evidences the difficulties involved in multimodal

transcription and the widespread logocentricity that makes students normalize, what

they perceive as, irregular linguistic patterns. Sindoni argues convincingly that this type

of exercises “should be incorporated into University curricula as heuristics for the

improvement of students’ critical skills and, more importantly, as open windows to gain

precious access into covert (educational) ideologies that still privilege the written

normativity of language”. This is an interesting conclusion, as Sindoni crucially sees

multimodal transcriptions as a way for the analyst to relate micro interactions with

societal ideologies at the macro-level. Jewitt (2016) argues that multimodal scholars

need to bring in social theory and historical contexts in order to do so.

Graphical communication, Herring claims, including avatar-mediated communication

has been around since the 1990s, became popular in the 2000s with Second Life, and is

still a common feature of virtual game worlds such as World of Warcraft. Included in

this category, we find emoticons, emoji, stickers, GIFs, and text-in-image memes; video

clips may also serve similar functions. Herring refers to these as graphicons and argues

that there are few discourse studies that analyze graphicons-in-use. Perez-Sabater (this

volume) does just that, however, by shedding light on the linguistic conventions of use

of emoticons in several WhatsApp communities interacting in Peninsular Spanish, with

a special focus on gender differences seen in adults’ use of emoticons. Another way in

which Perez-Sabater’s paper helps advance the field is by adopting a multimethod

approach based on ethnography and case studies. Her results show that, despite the large
number of graphicons available, men include them infrequently in their chats while

women, in contrast, make abundant use of them. This can be related, the author argues,

to women conforming to standard practices more often than men, which would entail

use of graphicons in this context. Furthermore, there seem to be no difficulties regarding

the interpretation of the meaning/functions of graphicons here, which may be due to the

graphicons themselves and/or to the fact that participants form coherent groups

regarding in/formality expectations.

Also, focusing on a different type of graphicon and applying cyberpragmatics, a

cognitive approach to the analysis of digital phenomena based on the fundamentals of

Relevance Theory, Yus analyzes the “image macro meme”. The application of

cognitive pragmatics theories to the study of digital, multimodal phenomena represents

a clear case of the cross-fertilization with other fields Georgakopoulou and Spilioti

(2016) see as a one of the signs of the language and digital field coming of age. These

memes consist of a line or two of text on top of the meme, line(s) of text at the bottom

and one picture in the middle. Yus (2016) argues that in the same way as we have

explicit interpretations (explicatures) and implicit or implicated interpretations

(implicatures) of verbal utterances, visual content also leads to visual explicatures and

visual implicatures. Consequently, the interpreting of a meme entails the processing of

the text, the processing of the picture, and the identification of possible connotative

meanings for text, picture, and text-picture combinations for which iconic literacy is

required. His purpose is to find out what text/picture, multimodal combination occurs

more frequently, why this is so, and how these combinations relate to predictions of

interpretive relevance. To do so, he applies McCloud’s (1994) taxonomy of categories

for comics (a genre very close to memes in its verbal-visual multimodal quality) to the

corpus. Yus’s results revealed that the language mode acquires prominence in the final
interpretation of the meme whereas visual information either illustrates, amplifies,

elaborates, or aids in altering what the linguistic information provided.

Important issues regarding the remediation and recontextualization of genres and their

configuring modes of communication are brought up by Johansson who focuses her

chapter on the opinion review genre and the transformations it undergoes when

migrating online. What is of more significance here is that the genre becomes highly

multimodal, as it contains multiple semiotic modes of presentation, hypertextual links,

and algorithm-based technological affordances for user participation. More importantly,

language is not necessarily the primary mode of communication which may be assumed

by other semiotic modes such as videos, interactive maps, figures, slideshows, etc.

Johansson looks closely at the nature and function of digital quotations such as tweets

and videos and how they integrate with ordinary quotations and the story line in

different meaning making ways. The multimodal complexity of the genre under scrutiny

requires a multimethod approach that combines digital discourse analysis with

sociopragmatics. The presence of the recontextualized quotations mediated by different

semiotic modes creates a polyglossic, hybrid genre in which an internal polylogic

exchange unfolds among persons and ideas that may have not interacted before.

All in all, despite its great relevance, Jewitt (2016) concludes that multimodality as a

field in itself is in its early stages of development in terms of theory and practices of

transcription. Furthermore, we would argue, many of the multimodal frameworks

available were not natively digital and thus present many problems when digitized in

terms of their application to the analysis of digital multimodal data (Bou-Franch &

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, under review). Therefore, we see a unique opportunity here

through which the systematic application of multimodality concepts and frameworks

may help advance not only the language and digital communication field, but also
multimodality itself to its final goal of accounting for how “Contemporary societies are

grappling with the social implications of the rapid increase in sophistication and range

of multimodal practices particularly within interactive digital media”. (O’Halloran &

Smith, 2011, p. 1)

Looking at the identities we construct digitally is another staple of the field and the

focus of the four chapters included in section IV, which are concerned with face and

identity. These chapters elaborate on notions relevant to the sociolinguistic awareness

brought about by second wave digital discourse studies; however, they advance the field

towards its third wave in that they report on critical and qualitative studies.

Language and social media researchers seem to agree on the centrality of the social

processes of self-presentation and relational management when communicating in

online environments. Thus, a significant number of studies focuses on media practices

that aim to construct who we are and how we relate to others (e.g. Bolander & Locher,

2015; Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014a, 2014b; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich,

2010; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch & Lorenzo-Dus, 2013; Georgakopoulou,

2013; Georgalou, 2016; Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, & Bou-Franch, 2011;

Page, 2012; Papacharissi, 2011; Tagg & Seargeant, 2014, 2016). Previous research in

discourse analysis sees identity practices as essentially discursive and relational, i.e. as

socially constructed. Identities emerge in interaction with others, and are constantly

changing, as different aspects become salient in interaction and individuals engage in

processes of negotiation, identification and disidentification with others (Bucholtz &

Hall, 2005; De Fina et al. 2006). Social media create new spaces for online identity

performances and negotiations, and the study of the processes behind the “formation of

new forms of social organization and social interaction” (Castells 2000, p. 693) needs to

pay special attention to the role played by the social and technological affordances
(Herring 2007). The availability of multiple semiotic modes for identity construction,

alongside users’ agentive choices to employ certain resources, are issues that will affect

identity construction and negotiation.

In their analysis of Facebook, for instance, Tagg and Seargeant (2014, 2016) focus on

issues of identity and community as the two crucial dynamics for the discursive

construction of social networking sites. Self-presentation processes and relational

practices are interconnected, they argue, through the audience design strategies that

online users employ to communicate through a collapsed audience. The influential

notion of context collapse - or the bringing together of different social groups into the

same digital space for interaction - in relation to social networking sites (Marwick &

boyd, 2011) is of importance in this respect, as users face the need to change the way

they act and interact socially in addressing their imagined networked audiences (Page,

2012). In particular, resources such as choice of language or topic, or strategic uses of

ambiguity and vagueness, among others, have been discussed as means of orienting to

imagined audiences, and further selecting or blocking specific (groups of) addressees in

multilingual, translocal communities where contexts collapse (e.g. Androutsopoulos,

2014, Tagg & Seargeant, 2014, 2016). These constitute important ways in which

identity and relational practices are performed and negotiated. Nevertheless, to move

the field forward, further studies of ways of doing sociability, of entextualizing identity

and relational practices in social media, are still needed. Particularly, explorations of

identity adopting critical perspectives are in short supply. Incidentally, this is one of the

directions towards a third wave of digital discourse studies (Georgakopoulou & Spilioti,

2016). For Thurlow (2017a), a critical perspective on digital practices within the field of

critical discourse analysis should examine the ways in which micro-level practices

construct social worlds and how macro-level structures and ideologies shape our
communicative practices, i.e. how texts and the worlds are mutually shaping/shaped

(by) each other. Indeed, we agree for the need to fruitful interconnections between

digital discourse and critical discourse analysis. It must be noted, however, that the

focus of much critical discourse analysis is on what is known as ‘elite discourses’ (van

Dijk, 1989) and, therefore, on the top-down processes of ideological hegemony to the

neglect of the “’bottom-up’ strategies of those who may contest or subvert these

ideologies” (Bucholtz, 2003, p. 58). Recent critical studies of (gender) ideologies and

social identity have called researchers to focus on popular digital practices, those of

ordinary (as opposed to elite) individuals, as technologies have brought about a

‘demotic turn’ (Turner, 2010) through which citizens have “gained access to a public

sphere in which to either contest or reinforce dominant ideologies” (Bou-Franch &

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014, p. 229; Bou-Franch, 2013). Herring, too, argues that

one of the challenges facing digital discourse analysis is to expand paradigms by

adopting “broader qualitative and critical perspectives” (this volume).

This challenge is taken up in the four chapters that address issues of identity and face in

this volume (by Vasquez & Sayers; Rudolf von Rohr, Thurnherr, & Locher; Petroni;

and Maíz-Arévalo). Vasquez and Sayers’ examination of the intertextual and

heteroglossic (Androutsopoulos, 2011) constructions of gender identities and ideologies

in a corpus of Amazon reviews constitutes an innovative, critical perspective on identity

construction. While Amazon constitutes a digital space for the selling of a variety of

products, it has appropriated one of the central features of social networking sites, i.e.

supporting sociability, as the corporate site offers consumers the possibility of posting

comments about the products on sale therein (Seargeant & Tagg, 2014). Research has

demonstrated the strength of this type of communication between consumer/reviewers

and prospective consumers/readers, as the latter are affected by such reviews and by the
extent of their social communion with the explicit/implicit information they can gather

about the social identities of online reviewers. In their analysis of ‘bona fide’ and

parody Amazon reviews, the authors identify the construction and circulation of

discourses and counter-discourses of normative gender ideologies, the engendering of

certain products, and discussions of gender politics. Thus, the corporate site is shown to

accommodate multiple voices and diverse worldviews positioned alongside modernist /

post-modernist (de)constructions of gender while consumers shop, consume, and

discuss products.

Rudolf von Rohr, Thurnherr, and Locher, too, adopt a qualitative methodology in their

analysis of identity alongside expertise in online health settings, thus moving the

analysis of digital discourse forward in relation to Herring’s claim mentioned above.

The construction of expert identities is investigated in data sets compiled from four

digital spaces of interaction which include (i) static, non-interactive websites where

professionals offer their recommendations, (ii) online advice columns containing

exchanges of letters between a professional persona and lay participants, (iii) dyadic

(professional/lay) email exchanges, and (iv) a final set of polylogic, lay interactions

from a health minded forum. By focusing on how professional and lay users

discursively enact expert identities Rudolf von Rohr et al. elaborate on the claim that

traditional dichotomous identities have become porous (Tagg & Seargeant, 2014). The

authors’ objective goes beyond the identification of expert-building practices to include

a study of how each online context shapes, empowers, or facilitates such practices.

Importantly, notions of socio-technological constraints and affordances (Gibson, 1986)

emerge in this study. As Jones et al. (2015) argue, the technological affordances of the

media should not be seen in any simplistic, deterministic sense and should instead be

taken as possibilities and resources made available by technologies which users may
rely on and resort to according to their communicative purposes on specific occasions.

The close qualitative analysis carried out by Rudolf von Rohr, Thurnherr, and Locher,

relying on positioning theory, crucially revealed the complex ways in which lay and

professional users employed a range of interconnected positioning strategies for the

creation of expert identities and the ways in which said strategies were embedded in the

four digital media under scrutiny. Interestingly, the authors were able to show how a

number of visual aspects of the layout of the websites analyzed contributed to enhance

the construction of expertise. In addressing visual features, they overcome a previous

shortcoming of scholarly efforts that attempted to explain the interaction between

technology and discourse using frameworks specifically designed for textual CMC, as

we mentioned above.

The exploration of issues of identity vis-à-vis the confluence of users’ agency and

technology, which is at the heart of the debate on the sociotechnological affordances of

digital communication, constitutes the primary object of inquiry of the chapter by

Petroni. Her study focuses on the construction of professional identities on LinkedIn;

more specifically, Petroni’s chapter investigates the interconnections of self-

presentation and self-branding in cases where identities are constructed by resorting to

promotional discourse strategies. A second objective of research lies in the extent to

which said marketized identities are produced through verbal resources or are generated

by the functionalities associated with the architecture of the technology itself. In this

way, the author addresses questions posed by Herring and Androutsopoulos (2015, p.

143) regarding what aspects of discourse a given technology shapes, “how strongly, in

what ways, and under what circumstances.” Another way in which this chapter moves

the field of digital discourse analysis forward lies in the use of mixed methods to carry

out the research. A corpus-assisted study is designed to classify identity building

strategies as leaning toward self-branding and promotion. The second, combined

method employs a critical perspective in assessing the social meanings of the

technology itself, and thus responds to the call to adopt “an altogether more critical,

carefully theorized take on technology” (Thurlow & Mroczek 2011: xxiv), which takes

into account how our digital practices are influenced and even controlled by the social

media.

The last chapter in section IV, devoted to face and identity, is related to group-building

and community practices on Facebook. Issues of community constitute one of the main

dynamics for the social construction of social networking sites, and one of the core

concepts that needs to be reconceptualized in current language and social media debates

(Georgakopoulou & Spilioti 2016; Tagg & Seargeant 2016). Maíz-Arévalo examines

ways in which users attend to each other in their media practices by engaging in

negotiations of face. Her study draws on notions of facework (Goffman 1955, Penman

1990) to specifically investigate how participants in the Facebook genre of public

common interest groups employ strategies for self and other face-restoration or repair.

The group under scrutiny conforms an online community with no offline relationship

and can, therefore, be associated with users that come together due to a shared interest

but have very loose ties. This Facebook group, therefore, shares ambient affiliation in

the sense of Zappavigna (2011), which is different from the type of ‘node-oriented’

community found in other Facebook interactions (Tagg & Seargeant, 2014). In this

context, and due to the loose ties among members, the author argues, community

members are not expected to increase their interactional involvement by resorting to

other-repair practices. However, her analysis shows that participants engage in different

forms of face restoration which are crucially seen as stemming from a concern to

maintain intra-group cohesion. This chapter, therefore, contributes to new insights into
digital discourse by identifying ways in which social processes underlying the formation

and maintenance of social identity and community are performed through face-repairing

strategies.

As has been mentioned above, advancing the field of language and digital

communication arguably involves for it to become more self-reflective and to develop a

critical agenda regarding discourses and ideologies of digital communication

(Georgakopoulou & Spilioti 2016). As Thurlow and Mroczek (2011, p. xxvi) discuss

digital technologies are inherently ideological regarding both “their political economies

of access and control and … their potential as mechanisms or resources for both

normative and resistive representations”. Jones et al. (2015) suggest a number of areas

in which the interconnections between power and ideology can be visible, such as in the

ideological agendas expressed on social media, as well as how the interface between

software and web interfaces limit users’ options or forces them to agree to certain terms

and conditions. The ethics involved in researching digital data and coming to grips with

the borders between the public and the private also emerge as a major concern (Spilioti

& Tagg, 2017) as do concerns about surveillance (Jones, 2016).

Section 5 of this collection is devoted to language and media ideologies and reflects the

current critical involvement of the field of digital discourse analysis. It does so in two

different ways: by looking at discourses about digital media (see among others Thurlow,

2006, 2017a; Spilioti, 2016) and also by analyzing the microlevel where language

ideologies are constantly constructed and reconstructed (Blackledge, 2002).

Sexting as it relates to semiotic ideologies has been the focus of recent research

(Thurlow, 2017b). Here, by analyzing young men’s understanding of sexting, Garcia-

Gomez looks into what the self-representations of heterosexual young men can tell us

about gendered discourses of youth sexualities, so as to gain insights into the ideologies
of sexualized youth cyberculture. His data are made up of guided discussions and

personal interviews with 27 British young men (aged 18 to 21). The results of Garcia-

Gomez’s analysis show how participants construct their male identities by abiding by

norms of traditional hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, these online sexual practices

seem to put additional demands on participants to perform as strong, virile, and sexually

active men, revealing men’s confusion about sexual agency and choice as a result of

young women’s sexually active agency and disinhibition. Sexting emerges not only as a

popular digital practice, but also as an influential mechanism for claiming and gaining

social recognition and value that allows young people to inhabit a “legitimate” subject

position. These views as especially interesting as they stand in sharp contrast with adult

ideologies about the digital practices of the youth, which have been discussed in terms

of moral panics caused by the perception that such practices may impact and alter the

existing social order and which are viewed as ways of disciplining the youth and

sexuality (Thurlow, 2006, 2014, 2017b).

Politeness is an essential component of social meaning and has been widely researched

within pragmatics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and other related fields.

How to define politeness is still subject to debate among politeness scholars. There is

agreement, however, that politeness can be defined from a second order, analyst based,

perspective or from a first order, lay participants, perspective (Watts 2003). When

taking the latter, politeness emerges as discursively constructed, subject to discursive

struggle, and profoundly ideological. (Eelen, 2001; Mills, 2003). In their chapter,

Sifianou and Bella resort to Twitter to look into “common sense” ideologies of Greek

politeness (Eelen 1999). Searching for instances of the keyword ευγένεια (‘politeness’ in

Greek) within text messages or twitter tags (hashtags #), they compiled the Twitter

Corpus of Greek Politeness (TC-GP) consisting of 345,000 words and 19,550 tweets
released by Greek tweeters from February 2009 to February 2015. The results of their

analysis show politeness being conceptualized as both verbal and nonverbal and in

broadly different terms, which is proof of the discursive struggle to which such notions

are subjected. The authors related their findings to orientation to networked audiences

and the necessary brevity of the messages. Furthermore, they saw the quoting of sources

as the attempt to construct a knowledgeable identity by imparting a sophisticated, witty

view possibly aiming at a positive self-presentation. Sifianou and Bella argue this

representation is tied to powerful ideologies associated with the positive view of

cultured individuals in the Greek culture. Twitter, in the authors’ view, emerges as a

new source of naturally occurring data which can provide insights into the perceptions

of various groups of people who may not be accessed in other ways and into how broad

social discourses are constructed at the microlevel.

The last chapter in the book tackles young people’s language ideologies regarding

standardization and texting (see also Thurlow 2006, 2014; Thurlow & Bell, 2009). In it,

Roeder, Miller, and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich report on a study on undergraduate

students’ audience awareness and attitudes about appropriate use of language and

particular language forms in text messages. This work was patterned after survey

studies that have found that students’ attitudes towards non-standard language varieties,

such as African American Vernacular English, can change after taking a single

linguistics class. The data for the study were collected by means of a survey that was

administered to students in three undergraduate linguistics classes at a large urban

research university in the South East of the US and were subjected to both quantitative

and qualitative analyses. Results indicated that students have significant pragmatic

awareness regarding recipiency coming into the classes and that explicit instruction can

lead to increased awareness of pragmatic norms and positively affect language

ideologies, albeit in an abstract way. While students’ voluntary comments indicated a

persistent perception that prescriptive norms of language should generally be adhered

to, students in the target class demonstrated that these powerful norms can be rethought

and challenged when exposed to studies and class discussions that treat these practices

as appropriate depending on one’s communicative purpose and audience.

Moving forward, language and digital communication scholars may want to look at

what has been called “multimodal critical discourse studies” (Machin, 2013) or critical

multimodal analysis of digital discourse” (Moschini, 2014). This line of enquiry is

especially interesting as it brings critical studies and multimodality together and

responds to van Leeuwen’s (2013) claim to the effect that, with few exceptions, there

has been little critical work done on the way that discourses are “communicated,

naturalized, and legitimized beyond the linguistic level” (Machin, 2013, p. 347) and

aims to investigate the ways critical discourse studies can help in understanding

meaning making in multimodal communication. The key question is how scholars

should approach the way that discourse and ideologies are disseminated concurrently

across different kinds of semiotic modes and genres. Another interesting contribution to

research on internet and digital phenomena is Critical Technocultural Discourse

Analysis. It is framed by cultural theory – critical race, feminism, queer theory, etc. – to

avoid “deficit-based models of underrepresented populations’ technology use” (Brock

2016, p. 1). These new approaches, developed within media studies, offer interesting

cross-fertilization possibilities.

In this introduction, we have embedded our overview of the contributions to this

volume within a narrative that reviews past and extant research on language and digital

communication. We have taken special care to highlight the ways in which each chapter

advances the field. In order to do so, we have carefully identified new methodological
and empirical insights put forth by the different authors. Specially, we have highlighted

the steps contributors to this volume have taken to help establish the so called third

wave of research and how these steps point to future directions in which to expand the

field of language and digital communication.

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