Critical Discourse Analysis and the challenges and opportunities of social media

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Discourse Analysis
• social media
• ideology
• multimodality
• semiotic technologies

Notes

1 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989), 20.

2 Paul Simpson and Andrea Mayr, Language and Power: A Resource Book for Students (London: Routledge, 2010), 2.

3 Ruth Wodak, ed., “Critical Discourse Analysis: Challenges and Perspectives,” in Critical Discourse Analysis, 4 vols (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), xix–xxxxiii.

4 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2001).

5 Ruth Wodak, “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory, and Methodology,” in Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed., ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 1–33.

6 Majid KhosraviNik and Mahrou Zia, “Persian Nationalism, Identity and Anti-Arab Sentiments in Iranian Facebook Discourses: Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Media Communication,” Journal of Language and Politics 13, no. 4 (2014): 755–80.

7 Crispin Thurlow, “Speaking of Difference: Language, Inequality and Interculturality,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 227–47; Gwen Bouvier, “What Is a Discourse Approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Other Social Media: Connecting with Other Academic Fields,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 10, no. 2 (2015): 149–62.

8 Gerlinde Mautner, “Time to Get Wired: Using Web-Based Corpora in Critical Discourse Analysis,” Discourse & Society 16, no. 6 (2005): 809–28.

9 Majid KhosraviNik and Johan Unger, “Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media: Power, Resistance and Critique in Changing Media Ecologies,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015), 205–33.

10 Ibid.

11 Robert G. Picard, “Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism? Evidence from the Changing News Ecosystem,” Digital Journalism 2, no. 3 (2014): 273.

12 Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis, eds., Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation (London: Routledge, 2015).

13 Alfred Hermida, “Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification,” Journalism Practice 6, no. 5–6 (2012): 659–68.

14 Picard, “Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism?”

15 Steve Paulussen and Raymond A. Harder, “Social Media References in Newspapers: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as Sources in Newspaper Journalism,” Journalism Practice 8, no. 5 (2014): 542–51.

16 Nicola Bruno, Tweet First, Verify Later? How Real-Time Information Is Changing the Coverage of Worldwide Crisis Events (Oxford: University of Oxford, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2011), http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/tweet-first-verify-later.

17 Larry Diamond “Liberation Technology,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 3 (2010): 70.

18 Majid KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” in Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. John Flowerdew and John Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 582–96.

19 Johan Unger, Ruth Wodak, and Majid KhosraviNik, “Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media Data,” in Qualitative Research, 4th ed., ed. David Silverman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2016), 277–93.

20 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” 583.

21 Stuart Allen, Online News: Journalism and the Internet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006).

22 David Machin and Lydia Polzer, Visual Journalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

23 Katy Parry, “The First ‘Clean’ War? Visually Framing Civilian Casualties in the British Press During the 2003 Iraq Invasion,” Journal of War & Culture Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 173–87.

24 Jared Keller, “Photojournalism in the Age of New Media Economy,” The Atlantic, April 4, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/photojournalism-in-the-age-of-new-media/73083/.

25 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti, eds., Amateur Images and Global News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

26 Bouvier, “What Is a Discourse Approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Other Social Media.”

27 Natalie Mortimer, “Trinity Mirror Makes ‘Major Investment’ in Online Video as it Admits Current Offering Is a ‘Poor Example,’” The Drum, March 4, 2014, http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/03/04/trinity-mirror-makes-major-investment-online-video-it-admits-current-offering-poor.

28 Tony Harcup, Journalism: Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015).

29 Paul Linford, “Trinity Mirror Launches Next Phase of ‘Digital First’ Strategy,” Hold the Front Page, September 8, 2015, http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2015/news/trinity-mirror-launches-next-phase-of-digital-first-strategy/.

30 José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

31 Bouvier, “What Is a Discourse Approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Other Social Media.”

32 Ken Doctor, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

33 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” 583.

34 Bouvier, “What Is a Discourse Approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Other Social Media.”

35 Gwen Bouvier, “How Journalists Source Trending Social Media Feeds: A Critical Discourse Perspective on Twitter,” Journalism Studies (2017): iFirst, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1365618.

36 Gwen Bouvier, “How Facebook Users Select Identity Categories for Self-Presentation,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7, no. 1 (2012): 37–57.

37 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS).”

38 Unger, Wodak, and KhosraviNik, “Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media Data.”

39 Majid KhosraviNik, “Right Wing Populism in the West: Social Media Discourse and Echo Chambers,” Insight Turkey 19, no. 3 (2017): 53–68.

40 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” 583.

41 See Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Capella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); KhosraviNik, “Right Wing Populism in the West.”

42 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

43 Arne Hintz, “Restricting Digital Sites of Dissent: Commercial Social Media and Free Expression,” Critical Discourse Studies 13, no. 3 (2016): 327.

44 James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting, and the Internet in Britain, 7th ed. (London: Routledge, 2010).

45 Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).

46 Dhiraj Murthy, “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter,” Sociology 46, no. 6 (2012): 1059–73.

47 Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006).

48 Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, trans. Mark Ritter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).

49 Ibid.

50 Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic–Relational Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Beck, The Reinvention of Politics; Eliot Freidson, Professionalism: The Third Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

51 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997).

52 Dean, Blog Theory, 5.

53 Machin and Polzer, Visual Journalism.

54 Gunther Kress, “Gains and Losses: New Forms of Texts, Knowledge, and Learning,” Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 19.

55 Dean, Blog Theory, 5.

56 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen, “Multimodality, Politics and Ideology,” Journal of Language and Politics 15, no. 3 (2016): 243–58.

57 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS).”

58 Majid KhosraviNik, “The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis,” Journal of Language and Politics 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–28.

59 Rodney H. Jones, Alice Chik, and Christopher A. Hafner, eds., Discourse and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2015).

60 Bouvier, “How Journalists Source Trending Social Media Feeds.”

61 Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek, Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

62 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” 593.

63 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS)”; Bouvier, “What Is a Discourse Approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Other Social Media.”

64 Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 28–44.

65 Fairclough, Language and Power, 28.

66 KhosraviNik and Zia, “Persian Nationalism, Identity and Anti-Arab Sentiments in Iranian Facebook Discourses”; Susan C. Herring, “Computer-Mediated Conversation: Introduction and Overview,” Language@Internet 7 (2010): Article 2, http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2801; Jones, Chik, and Hafner, Discourse and Digital Practices.

67 Anders Hansen and David Machin, Media and Communication Research Methods (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

68 Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015).

69 danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 119–42.

70 Rhiannon Bury, “Praise You Like I Should: Cyberfans and Six Feet Under,” in It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, ed. Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley (London: Routledge, 2008), 190–208.

71 Christine Hine, Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

72 Buck Rosenberg, “The Our House DIY Club: Amateurs, Leisure Knowledge and Lifestyle Media,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 173–90.

73 Machin and van Leeuwen, “Multimodality, Politics and Ideology.”

74 Sonia Livingstone, “The Challenge of Changing Audiences: Or, What Is the Audience Researcher to Do in the Age of the Internet?” European Journal of Communication 19, no. 1 (2004): 75–86.

75 Donatella Selva, “Social Television: Audience and Political Engagement,” Television & New Media 17, no. 2 (2016): 161.

76 Liesbet van Zoonen, “Audience Reactions to Hollywood Politics,” Media, Culture & Society 29, no. 4 (2007): 531–47.

77 Lyndon C. S. Way, “YouTube as a Site of Debate through Populist Politics: The Case of a Turkish Protest Pop Video,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 10, no. 2 (2015): 180–96; Joel Rasmussen, “‘Should Each of Us Take Over the Role as Watcher?’ Attitudes on Twitter towards the 2014 Norwegian Terror Alert,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 10, no. 2 (2015): 197–213.

78 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” 587.

79 Ibid., 592.

80 Bouvier, “How Journalists Source Trending Social Media Feeds.”

81 Per Ledin and David Machin, Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2018).

82 Theo van Leeuwen, “Multimodality,” in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 447–65.

83 Machin and van Leeuwen, “Multimodality, Politics and Ideology.”

84 Machin and Polzer, Visual Journalism.

85 Unger, Wodak, KhosraviNik, “Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media Data.”

86 Bouvier, “How Journalists Source Trending Social Media Feeds.”

87 Theo van Leeuwen, “New Forms of Writing, New Visual Competencies,” Visual Studies 23, no. 2 (2008): 130–35.

88 Ledin and Machin, Doing Visual Analysis.

89 Ibid.

90 Unger, Wodak, and KhosraviNik, “Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media Data.”

91 Emilia Djonov and Theo Van Leeuwen “The Semiotics of Texture: From Tactile to Visual,” Visual Communication 10, no. 4 (2011): 541–64; Sumin Zhao and Len Unsworth, “Touch Design and Narrative Interpretation: A Social Semiotic Approach to Picture Book Apps,” in Apps, Technology and Younger Learners: International Evidence for Teaching, ed. Natalia Kucirkova and Garry Falloon (London: Routledge, 2016), 89–102.

92 Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress, Multimodality, Learning and Communication: A Social Semiotic Framework (London: Routledge, 2016); Ledin and Machin, Doing Visual Analysis.

93 Crispin Thurlow, “Fakebook: Synthetic Media, Pseudo-Sociality and the Rhetorics of Web 2.0,” in Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, ed. Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 225–48.

94 See Gerlinde Mautner, “The Privatization of the Public Realm: A Critical Perspective on Practice and Discourse,” in Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, ed. Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 463–79; Gavin Brookes, Kevin Harvey, and Louise Mullany, “‘Off to the Best Start?’ A Multimodal Critique of Breast and Formula Feeding Health Promotional Discourse,” Gender and Language 10, no. 3 (2016): 340–63.

95 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS),” 586.

96 Majid KhosraviNik, “Critical Discourse Analysis, Power, and New Media Discourse,” in Why Discourse Matters: Negotiating Identity in the Mediatized World, ed. Yusuf Kaylango Jr. and Monika Weronika Kopytowska (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 287–306.

97 Bouvier, “What Is a Discourse Approach to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Other Social Media.”

98 Ibid.

99 KhosraviNik, “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS).”