Digital discourse:

Locating language in new/social media

Crispin Thurlow

To appear (2017) in

J. Burgess, T. Poell & A. Marwick (eds),

Handbook of Social Media. New York: Sage.

In this chapter, I introduce what is sometimes called computer-mediated discourse analysis

or just digital discourse studies; this is a world of research that attends primarily to

linguistic, sociolinguistic and discursive phenomena in new/social media. The chapter

starts with a brief review of the field, referring to key moments, issues, and scholars. With

this done, I move to identifying three broad organizing principles in digital discourse

research: discourse, multimodality, ideology. A key objective with this overview is to show

how digital discourse studies attends to both micro-level linguistic practices and more

macro-level social processes; by the same token, scholars in the field are increasingly

interested in understanding how language intersects with other modes of communication.

New/social media have actually been pushing language scholars to rethink the foundations

and boundaries of their work. In this regard, my chapter then turns to consider a selection

of studies which exemplify a number of language-related issues, but which also demonstrate

an analytic framework for understanding the way language takes place in new/social media

as a metadiscursive resource, a metrolingual resource, a transmodalizing resource, and a

technologizing resource. Recognizing the fuzziness of the labels ‘new’ and ‘social’, my

chapter deliberately retains a dual new/social focus, not least because discourse scholars

1
start from the premise that language is inherently and unavoidably social. Much of the

research cited here is written in English and/or about English, even though the sites, topics

and authors represent a far more diverse field. Unless specifically attending to different

ways of speaking or writing, discourse studies is principally concerned with the uses of

language in general rather than any particular language.

Background

In the last decade there has been something of a boom in the broadly defined field of digital

discourse studies – that is, scholars whose work centers on the language of new/social

media within the even wider field of what is sometimes called Computer Mediated

Communication. (No doubt the editors of this volume will have, from the outset, commented

on the issues of labelling and terminology that plague academia generally and digital media

studies in particular.) Some of the best examples of this digital discourse boom are listed

below as ideas for further reading (see p.000). To set the scene, however, I start here with

little of the ‘history’ of the field, which is also a way for me to start introducing some of its

major organizing principles.

Arguably the best known, internationally recognizable scholar of new media language

is Susan Herring who, in 1996, edited a foundational English-language collection titled

Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

(Herring, 1996). Herring has always characterized her own work as Computer Mediated

Discourse Analysis (or just CMDA; e.g., Herring, 2001, 2011) and is someone who retains one

of the best overall perspectives on the field (see Herring, 2004, 2013, 2015; although see

also Baron, 2008).1 From the beginning, Herring helped establish the core linguistic

variables needed for an analysis of new media language: structure (e.g., typography,

spelling, word choice, sentence structure); meaning (i.e., of symbols, words, utterances,

exchanges); interaction (e.g., turn-taking, topic development, back-channels, repairs); and

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social function (e.g., identity markers, humour and play, face management, conflict). In

framing new media language, studies should also attend to key technological variables (e.g.,

synchronicity, persistence of transcript, channels of communication) and situational

variables (e.g., number of participants, demographics, setting, purpose, topic). This basic

framework continues to inform a great deal of digital discourse research. Scholars have,

however, sought to push the field further; for now, I shall mention just two early examples.

Another foundational moment in the field was the publication in 2006 of a special

issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on computer-mediated communication, edited by

Jannis Androutsopoulos.2 In his introductory paper, Androutsopoulos (2006) offered some

important pointers for deepening digital discourse research; most notably, the need to

move beyond an undue emphasis on the linguistic and orthographic features of digital

media language, shifting towards more ethnographically-grounded user-related

approaches. In more recent work, Androutsopoulos (e.g., 2010, 2011) has continued to

promote the value of research shaped by this type of discourse-ethnographic rather than

variationist-sociolinguistic approach; in other words, pushing us to pay less attention to the

formal features of new media language (i.e., what it looks like) and more attention to the

situated practices of new media language (i.e., what it does – or, rather, what people do with

it). Along much the same vein, Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2006) offered her own

recommendations for extending the field. These included: ensuring that the study of

language is grounded in a concern for broader sociocultural practices and inequalities of

communities; considering the connections between online and offline practices, and

between different technologies; and emphasizing the contextual, particularistic nature of

new media language. Once again, we see in Georgakopoulou’s recommendations a growing

preference for research that is more committed to the social meanings of technology and its

particular (hence ‘particularistic’) significance for specific users, groups or communities. In

many ways, this paradigm shift brings digital discourse analysis into line with similar shifts

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in new media studies more generally. In a nutshell, what we see is digital media language

scholars turning away from the purely or distinctively ‘linguistic’ and towards a more

properly discursive or communicative approach. And this brings me nicely to three

organizing principles at the heart of digital discourse studies

Core organizing principles

Most research on digital discourse nowadays responds either directly or indirectly to the

kinds of paradigmatic issues and recommendations sketched above. Inspired by these

priorities, I want now to offer three broader organizing principles which define the core

work of new/social media language scholarship (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011). For such an

already interdisciplinary field – and in the context of an extremely interdisciplinary volume

– these types of conceptual clarifications have the added benefit of making things a little

more transparent and hopefully understandable.

Discourse

Putting ‘language’ in its place – and following the lead of those scholars already

mentioned – it is essential to recognize that digital discourse is interested in

language only in so far as it illuminates social and cultural processes (cf. Bucholtz &

Hall, 2008, on ‘sociocultural linguistics’). In other words, the primary concern is not

with the abstract, grammatical language of linguistics, but rather the everyday

functions and uses of language. It is for this reason that we tend to use the term

discourse. (For excellent introductions to discourse studies, see Cameron & Panović,

2014; Jaworski & Coupland, 2014). In linguistically-oriented discourse analysis

there is typically a shared commitment to the following: the social functions of

language, the interactional accomplishment of meaning, the significance of

communicator intent, and the relevance of context. This has two specific

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implications for digital discourse studies. First, we recognize the inherently

mediated nature of all communication (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon 2001) and not

just in the case of so-called computer-mediated communication; communication is

always contextualized (i.e., mediated, embodied, emplaced) by, for example,

relationship, setting, layout, gesture, accent and typography. The second implication

of a social-cultural approach to language is a need to think also about its increasing

technologization (cf. Fairclough, 1999). What is meant here is that we engage also

with the historical-political context of contemporary language use: its

commodification and its recontextualized use as a lifestyle resource to be sold back

to us, or as a workplace tool used to manage us (see Cameron, 2000; Heller, 2003).

This, as Pierre Bourdieu (1991) has famously discussed, recognizes language as a

mode of symbolic power and why language is always a matter of political economy.

Multimodality

Multimodality is increasingly regarded as a core concept in and the study of

discourse (e.g., Jewitt, 2014; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), which means attending

to the way language interacts with – and is only made meaningful through its

interaction with – other semiotic systems. This is especially germane given the

growing complexity of the multi-media formats of contemporary communication,

brought about by the inevitable convergence of “old” and “new” media and the

layering of different digital media. In their efforts to redress the previous absence of

linguistic issues in computer-mediated communication, digital discourse scholars

have sometimes overlooked the fact that words are only ever part of the picture. All

texts, all communicative events, are always achieved by means of multiple semiotic

resources, even so-called text-based new media like instant- and text-messaging.

Herein lies much of the potential in new media for invention and creativity; time and

5
again, research shows how users overcome apparent semiotic limitations,

reworking and combining – often playfully – the resources at their disposal. Well-

known scholars of multimodality, Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuwen (2001: 11)

use the bedroom for demonstrating the inherent multimodality of texts as well as

the ‘orchestration’ of multiple semiotic modes. But another useful invocation of the

bedroom is to be found in Rodney Jones’ (2010) more literal reference to it as a

common site for young people’s digital media practices. In either case, digital

discourse seeks to understand the situated, spatialized (which is also to say mobile)

experiences of new/social media.

Ideology

Linguistically-oriented discourse studies, especially that falling under the rubric of

Critical Discourse Studies, often also orients to the notion of Foucauldian discourses;

as such, it combines both d-discourse and D-discourse (Gee, 2010). In practice, what

this means is that scholars are interested in (a) the ways micro-level interactional

and textual practices constitute our social worlds, and (b) the ways our everyday

communicative/representational practices are structured by larger systems of

belief and hierarchies of knowledge. In other words, we seek to understand how our

uses of language feed ideological systems, just as we want to know how ideologies

shape the way we use language. Of course, new/social media are themselves

inherently ideological, both in terms of their political-economies of access and

control (i.e., some have, some have none/less), but also in terms of their potential as

mechanisms for both normative and counter-normative representation; they are

used to control people, and they are used to resist control. This is quite apparent

when one thinks of the symbolic power of the news and broadcast media, but no less

is true of any number of seemingly mundane mechanical, medical or digital

6
 technologies. And, coming full circle, language too is fully ideological. Online or

offline, spoken or typed, face-to-face or digitally ‘mediated’, what people do with

language has material consequence (cf. Foucault, 1981) and language is

instrumental in establishing categories of difference, relations of inequality or, at

the very least, the social norms by which we all feel obliged to live our lives. Whether

it is done by academics, journalists, teachers or ‘non-experts’, talk about language

(or metalanguage) always exposes the power/privilege: competing standards of

‘correct’, ‘good’ or ‘normal’ language; debates about literacy and occupational

training; and the social categorization and disciplining of speakers. And, as work on

language ideology (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994) reminds us, talk about language is

usually a matter of disciplining the bodies of speakers rather than the niceties of

their speech.

These three organizing principles are clearly inter-related and they are presented here as a

series of only loosely mapped statements. I should also add that different scholars orient

differently to these principles, with some being more or less interested in questions of

multimodality and/or ideology, for example. All, however, agree on the way we think about

the language – that is, as discourse – even if we may decide to focus on different aspects of

it. In this regard, I turn now to my proposal for a four-part framework for researching

new/social media language.

Analytic framework

In the real-world contexts of digital discourse, language emerges as a kind of figure-ground

illusion, switching into and out of focus at different moments. Sometimes it feels as if

language is everywhere, other times it is nowhere; it can be high-profile and dominant one

minute, low-key and almost invisible the next. And this becomes increasingly true as our

7
technologies keep evolving and converging, and, to some extent, approximating face-to-face

communication with all its immediacy, complexity and variety. (Which is certainly not to

say that face-to-face communication is necessarily the best or highest order of human

interaction) It is also true to say that the place of language in digital discourse is bound up

with some deep-seated mythologies about the nature of language (see language ideologies

above) and rooted in the global linguistic marketplace. In other words, we must remember

that all ways of speaking/writing are not equal or treated as equal. With this in mind, I want

to consider the place of the English language in digital discourse as a convenient way to

think about a more comprehensive approach to understanding and/or studying language in

new/social media.

Language as a metadiscursive resource

The language of digital media is often depicted in the news media and other public

venues as a threat to the language; we hear that, for example, English is somehow

being lost or that society is losing its control of ‘good’, ‘proper’ or standard English

(Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008; Thurlow 2006). According to reputable news sources,

new communication technologies ‘ruin grammar’ and ‘beat up’ or ‘corrupt’

languages. And this way of talking about digital discourse is fairly persistent even in

spite of evidence to the contrary (Tagliamonte, 2016; Thurlow, 2014). The bottom

line, of course, is that English cannot really be lost because it was technically never

‘found’ in the first place. There never was a neatly demarcated, unequivocally

prescribed ‘Golden Age of English’ with a fully secured, unchanging standard. Take

a look at this random sample of international newspaper headlines about texting:

• Text-speak: language evolution or just laziness?

• Problems With Teens Texting Too Much

8
 • Texting more popular than face-to-face conversation

• Are Teens Texting Away their Lives?

• Twtr? It’s majorly bad! Leading headteacher condemns ‘text speak’

• Is Texting Killing the English Language?

• Your Texting Addiction is Starting to Cost the Government

These headline stories are all matters of social or moral judgement rather than

linguistic ones. It is the perception of language threat – or language loss – that is real.

In thinking about the place of English vis-à-vis new/social media, therefore, what we

see here is language being taken up as a metadiscursive resource for telling a

particular story about technology, but also about young people. In other words, this

is “language about language” or rather discourse about discourse, written by adult

journalists for (mostly) other adults. Language is, thus, not simply a way of

communicating but a powerful resource for representing young people – so-called

‘digital natives’ – and a resource by which adults may perform their own identities

as adults. As Deborah Cameron (1995) argues, none of this is especially new; every

generation likes to complain about the next generation’s communication practices.

This is nonetheless an important context in which we see language taking place in

and around new/social media.

Needless to say, telling an exaggerated story about digital discourse makes for

good news. The story of a ‘new language’ or of ‘language threat’ sells much better

than a story about the gradual, inevitable ‘evolution’ of English or about the ways

young people’s communication is actually being enhanced by new/social media.

Which, of course, is precisely what a lot of empirical evidence reveals. Take a look at

these messages – the first from the Irish Times (see Thurlow, 2006), the second and

third from my own empirical data (Thurlow, 2003; Thurlow & Poff, 2013):

9
In the news …

• Mst f d tym dey usd ds knd f lng’ge 2 tlk 2 1 anthr nt 1ly n txt bt evn

n wrtng ltrs 2

In real life …

• Have you had a shower today as I’m sure I can smell u from

here!(Teehee)

• Where r u?We r by the bar at the back on the left.

Unlike the kinds of completely fabricated, unrealistic ‘examples’ that often appear

in news reports, the language of texting and other digital discourse is really

surprisingly unremarkable. Regardless of their emoticons, abbreviations and non-

conventional spellings, most messaging is far from hieroglyphic and unintelligible.

Besides, as Tim Shortis (2007) has shown, most of the features thought to typify

digital discourse have long-standing precedents in English anyway – even the

supposedly iconic letter-number homophones (gr8). Digital discourse, while

sometimes distinctive, is often far from unique. And this is precisely why studies of

people’s actual practices are always needed. English may well be changing but not

in the ways – or to the extent – that news-makers would have us believe. Nor are

old, conventionalized ways of doing English being straightforwardly or

comprehensively replaced. Besides, it is not all about English anyway.

Language as a metrolingual resource

In digital discourse – but also in other contexts – English is increasingly dislodged

and dislocated in all sorts of different ways. It is certainly less and less the de facto

language of new/social media as it once was. If anything typifies digital English, it is

the mixing of registers and styles, and the blending of vernacular and official ways

10
of speaking/writing. (This is why teachers are sometimes driven to distraction by

their students’ emails.) In their large-scale study of text-messaging, for example,

Christa Dürscheid and Elisabeth Stark (2011) amassed a compelling story of the

multilingual nature of digital discourse. Here is an example of one of their more

striking text-messages:

Olla fratello!!! Come stai? Wie geht’s dir so? Immer noch so lange am

arbeiten wie früher? Ich hab endlich mein eigenes Restaurant und mucho

travajo aber macht mir extrem spass ... ;-) allora amore, buona giornata

und luegsch uf di, gäll ...;-) peace (Dürscheid & Stark, 2011)

With four other languages being used, we see how English (underlined for clarity)

figures as just one linguistic resource. Particularly given the translocal spaces of new

media, where speakers/writers are often reaching beyond domestic spaces and

national boundaries, digital discourse often resembles a linguistic ‘mash-up’ (see

Leppänen et al., 2009). And these kinds of translocal, multilingual practices take

place across a range of new/social media genres and contexts, as we see in examples

from studies of microblogging by Carmen Lee (2011) in Hong Kong and by Saija

Peuronen (2011) in Finland (again, English references underlined).

WOW~~~WOW˜˜!!!!! 加油!!!! (Lee, 2011)

Sanotaan näin et kyl voit chilli rullail kaupungil.Varmaan poljet

nopeempaa kun mostly skedejät. Mut jos poljet rec(reational)

rullaavien kavereiden kaa,jäät kyl harmittavan paljon jälkeen … ei nää

oo niin opeet ku perus rullaimet. Mut voit kyl muutenki rullailla… Mut

11
 rec rullamil ET VOI grindata … et sinäänsä temppu rullat on only do it

all skate!  (Peuronen, 2011)

Here we have people dipping into and out of the global lingua franca, a language

which may or may not be their own, at least not in straightforward ways. Nor is it

straightforwardly ‘languages’ at play. As Peuronen demonstrates, the English that is

used is not straightforwardly standard English, but rather particular varieties and

subcultural styles of English. Indeed, digital discourse not only problematizes and

challenges our tendency to overdraw the notion of languages (i.e., in practice,

languages are not neatly separated or always easily distinguishable), but also our

assumptions about the discrete nature of language itself (see next section). It is for

this reason that digital discourse may be characterized by a term like

metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010), which tries to account for the creative,

mix-and-match ways that people nowadays take up different ways of speaking as

playful and transcultural resources.

It is also worth noting that the spaces – or cyberspaces – of English or any

other language are certainly no longer neatly demarcated or ring-fenced. Anyone

who travels will notice how ostensibly English-language texts are now constantly

interpenetrated with the sounds and voices of other speakers, other languages.

Opening up the BBC News homepage or my World Time Buddy page in Bern or

Buenos Aires, I am immediately presented with a reconfigured linguistic landscape

with, for example, local advertisements in local languages. New-media texts are

often especially and explicitly heteroglossic, comprising multiple voices and multiple

types of voices (Androutsopoulos, 2010, 2011). By the same token, they are also

always multimodal.

12
Language as a multimodal resource

As a heavily keyboard-driven means of communicating, digital discourse is in some

ways intensely verbal. Yetlanguage is either secondary or marginal or altogether

irrelevant to the kinds of everyday meaning making that happen with digital media.

Any Facebook profile proves this point: they are often multi-lingual, and almost

always multi-modal and multi-media. Indeed, one of the major problems with

newspaper reporting about digital discourse is its noticeable and consistent

disregard not only for the creativity of young people’s language use, but also for the

innovative, multimodal design-work that often characterize their new/social media

practices. By the same token, the problem with many language scholars is that they

tend to single out language for isolated analysis.

Two students chatting online [starts: 12:39am]

P1: is that who you went to the passion concert with?

P2: YES

P2: woooww

P2: how did u know!?!?!?!?

P1: lol you told me..?

P1: how did you hear about passion anyway?

P2: paul

P2: paul invited me. and i listend to passions song on youtube

P2: and i LOVED it

P1: oh haha

P1: haha is he flip

P2: i love acoustic guitar

13
 P2: and piano

P1: i knowwwwww

P2: i have a picture with him hehe and his songs on my ipod

The extract above from two of my students chatting online clearly does not look like

an email, a business letter, or an academic essay. (See Thurlow, 2012, for the

complete extract and full discussion.) This is not formal, written English. Nor is it

meant to be. More to the point, however, what is happening here is not simply a

matter of language per se. The significance (in both senses of the word) of this

exchange – its communicative force – lies as much in the visual as it does in the

verbal. That the two have ever been separated for academic purposes says much

about our own theoretical presuppositions and analytic conveniences. Words on the

page or the screen have never, in practice, been simply verbal. No neat boundaries

exist in digital discourse between standard written English and vernacular, spoken

English or between global English and local English, or between English and other

languages; by the same token, the symbolic and material properties of language be

seldom be separated out. This is what Carmel Vaisman’s (2011) research on the

blogging ‘language’ of Israeli Fakatsa girls shows rather nicely (Figure 7.1).

In this example, the line between the use of language and the design of language is

very blurred. In recognizing and accounting for the creative, playful uses of language

14
in new/social media contexts, we often witness unorthodox, experimental worlds –

the kind of language practices that, following Evelyn Ch’ien (2004), we might think

of as weird English or, in this case, weird Hebrew. (And to be clear: ‘weird’ here is

meant as a good thing!) It is certainly the case that language is not neatly bounded

in digital discourse and studies must always attend to – and account properly – for

the ways it intersects with and relies on other modes of communication.

Language as a technologizing resource

I come now to the last of my four analytic frames for thinking about the place of

language in digital discourse. In this regard, I want to draw attention to the ways

language and communication are commodified, instrumentalized and technologized

in new/social media contexts. In keeping with the work of Critical Discourse

Analysts, therefore, we are obliged to consider how digital media are used in ways

to shape and control our communicative practices (cf. Cameron, 2000; Fairclough,

1999). As a case in point, I offer The British Monarchy Facebook profile and the

following excitable BBC News headline from October 2014: ‘The Queen sends her

first tweet through @BritishMonarchy’. And the image accompanying this story?

The British head of state, suitably behatted and wearing a matching Twitter-blue

coat, stands in front of a podium with her forefinger tentatively outstretched

towards a tablet screen – poised to tweet!

As I have argued before, this is not social media as many of us might

understand or experience it (Thurlow, 2013). You certainly know something

different is happening when one of the most detached, socially removed figureheads

on the planet creates a Facebook profile or sends her first tweet. In fact, digital

media – and especially social media – are increasingly used as tools for performing

access, for staging participation and interaction. It is in this way that we see

15
 technology itself being taken up as a rhetorical resource. All of which is akin to what

Norman Fairclough (1989) called synthetic personalization: the way businesses and

organizations address mass markets/audiences as if they were all individuals.

Technology is key to this process as we also see in automated customer-service

systems designed to manage our interactions or in various apps offering to help us

‘manage’ our social lives (e.g., chatbots or ‘conversational agents’ like Apple’s Siri or

Amtrak’s Julie; also Swarm, Tinder and other so-called ‘social discovery apps’). All

these are examples of how the social functions and meanings of language and

communication are nowadays often disembedded and deployed as ‘plug-ins’ that

skillfully blur the boundary between talk and technology. In effect, technology is

presented to us as a stand-in for talk. It is for this reason also, and following what

was said above about d-discourse and D-discourse, that a proper understanding of

digital discourse requires that we be equally concerned with large-scale discourses

(i.e., systems of power/knowledge) as we are with the linguistic specificities of

discourse and everyday talk or writing.

Just as we find language and communication moving to center stage in our social and

economic lives, many of our traditional, familiar ways of knowing and using language are

being unsettled – not least due to the nature and impact of new/social media. And this is a

challenge for scholars of language and for everyday language users alike. What I hope to

have done in this chapter is to show some of the ways this is happening in the case of English

and English-language research. Just as languages are less easily read as ‘authentic’ markers

of identity and place, language itself is not so readily located in words and individual texts.

Instead, we see language/s being recontextualized and resemioticized in different ways;

that is, they are used outside their normal contexts, and used for a range of different

purposes. Digital discourse, by no means a monolithic entity or practice itself, also demands

16
a recognition of the relative place or importance of English and, indeed, the relative place or

importance of language itself. Certainly, many of the people who use English on a daily basis

have moved beyond monolingual, monolithic notions of English; they have also moved well

beyond the notion of monomodal communication. And digital discourse is both evidence of

these changes as well as a force that works to bring about these changes.

Further reading

Like all new/social media research, the field moves quickly and changes constantly. In

addition to the foundational literature sketched above and in addition to the studies cited

here, I recommend the following handbook collections for a broader, more current survey

of digital discourse research: Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2015), Seargeant and Tagg

(2014) and Herring et al. (2013). Two particularly useful texts are offered by Barton and

Lee (2013) and by Page et al. (2014). In addition to papers published from time to time in

New Media & Society and in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, two of the

best journals for finding digital discourse research are the open-source Language@Internet

(edited by foundational scholar Susan Herring) and Discourse, Context & Media.

Acknowledgements

As agreed with the volume editors, this chapter draws closely, but succinctly, on the

introduction to my co-edited volume Digital Discourse: Language and New Media (Thurlow

& Mroczek, 2011) and combines material from another recent piece published in Spanish

(Thurlow, in press).

Notes

17
 1. In his Language and the Internet, David Crystal (2006) offers a very accessible

summary of some core linguistic issues, drawing on a wide range of other people’s

research.

2. In the European context at least, scholars like Jannis Androutsopoulos are pivotal

in connecting English-language research with research being done in other

languages, and vice versa. Much the same role is played by someone like Ana

Deumert (2014) who, while writing through English, is also a rare example of a

prominent scholar engaging new/social media beyond the usual North-

American/European contexts. In this regard, the work of people like Carmen Lee

(e.g., 2011) and Yukiko Nishimura (e.g., 2011) has been key in extending our

understanding of East Asian contexts. The fact remains, however, that digital

discourse research continues to be driven by English-language publications with

relatively little coverage of Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and

South/South-East Asia.

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