Social Media and Its Impact on Intercultural Communication: The Challenges for a Discourse Approach

The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media, despite a number of notable scholarly works. This paper looks at some of the challenges for a discourse approach to multicultural communication on social media. It sees the global communication landscape as fundamentally transformed and shifted in the ways in which identities and communities play out. The paper concludes by thinking about what the consequence of these are, specifically the way identity is negotiated online, how cross-cultural debate pans out, how the status of knowledge is changing, and the relationship between the online and offline world. The challenge for discourse studies is to create more robust research and studies that provide concrete examples of these changes

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

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media despite a number of notable scholarly works. But as yet there has been little that has dealt specifically with issues of multicultural discourse – how language, identity, cross-cultural social relations and power play out in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media. In this paper, I show why discourse studies must engage with theories and empirical work on social media across academic fields beyond discourse studies and linguistics, at how these can help best frame the kinds of research that needs to be done, how to best formulate some of the basic questions of critical discourse analysis for this new communicative environment. I use this as a platform to point to the areas where multicultural discourse studies can work – where all the ambiguities of former studies of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are present, but realised in new ways. Yet these new forms of communication are fused into wider patterns of changing cultural values about forms of social structure, knowledge itself and the kinds of issues that tend to form our individually civic spheres

Social Media and Its Impact on Intercultural Communication: The Challenges for a Discourse Approach

The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media, despite a number of notable scholarly works. This paper looks at some of the challenges for a discourse approach to multicultural communication on social media. It sees the global communication landscape as fundamentally transformed and shifted in the ways in which identities and communities play out. The paper concludes by thinking about what the consequence of these are, specifically the way identity is negotiated online, how cross-cultural debate pans out, how the status of knowledge is changing, and the relationship between the online and offline world. The challenge for discourse studies is to create more robust research and studies that provide concrete examples of these changes

Critical discourse analysis and the challenges and opportunities of social media

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a particular strand of discourse analysis that focuses on the role of language in society and in political processes, traditionally targeting texts produced by elites and powerful institutions, such as news and political speeches. The aim is to reveal discourses buried in language used to maintain power and sustain existing social relations. However, since the internet and social media have come to define much of the way that we communicate, this brings numerous challenges and also opportunities for CDA. The relationship between text and ideology, and between the author and reader, appears to have changed. It is also clear that new methods are required for data collection, as content takes new forms and also moves away from running texts to language that is much more integrated with forms of design, images, and data. Also, new models are required to address how the technologies themselves come to shape the nature of content and discourse

How Journalists Source Trending Social Media Feeds

Media scholars have called for more research to understand the consequences of news outlets becoming increasingly reliant on social media for sourcing stories, and how this is changing the nature of news and the role of the journalist. This also has high relevance for the Critical Discourse Analyst as regards processes of attributing the nature of ideology, where there is a shift away from stories derived from elite sources and official organizations. Using a sample of 26 news stories and a corpus of 40,000 tweets from a feed called #twowomentravel, which dealt with the journey of two women travelling from Ireland to the United Kingdom for an abortion, this paper uses Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the discourses from the feed are taken up by the journalists. Findings show an erosion of some of the basic former aspects of journalistic practice related to verification and provision of context as what is “trending” becomes a news definer. Yet those with the skills to understand how it is integrated into news production may use this to disseminate their own ideology

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

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

Clothing and meaning making: a multimodal approach to women’s abayas

This article takes a multimodal discourse approach to women’s fashion in the Middle East. It places the Islamic abaya in the UAE in the context of the wider literature on fashion and identity, exploring the way in which clothing features and forms can prescribe ideas, values and attitudes, and framing this discussion within newer ideas on globalization. As Roland Barthes argued, it is not so much personal choice or diversity in fashion that is of interest, but the kinds of values and expected behaviours that they imply. The abaya, on the one hand, represents a more newly arrived idea of traditional, local and religious identity, linking to some extent to an imagined sense of a monolithic notion of Islamic clothing. But, on the other hand, this is itself reformulated locally through international representations, ideas and values, and integrated with newer ideas of taste