With an increasingly competitive vlogging market on social media on a global scale, there have been more diversified groups of foreign vloggers who make a living by creating bilingual contents about China. Some recent studies have discussed how foreign vloggers help promote the nationalist discourse of China on Chinese social media. YouTube as a social media platform which is officially...
Anti-immigration rhetoric has been one of the prevalent themes among QAnon’s online crowdsourced conspiracies in light of the US border crisis and the so-called ‘great replacement theory’(Cosentino, 2020). To better understand the contours of QAnon’s immigration-related disinformation dissemination, it is critical to investigate its discursive characteristics and interactional macro functions...
Introduction. The spread of the internet use in the 1990s led to the emergence of a new communication and linguistic mode. The study aims to explore how the use of a particular social network site, Instagram influences the linguistic style of the Hungarian police in the online sphere.
Method. This study deals with the linguistic characteristics of the posts (N=122) created on the Instagram...
With social media, news outlets have lost control over the production and the distribution of news,
because news is now also generated by news audiences who can share and comment on it (Bruns,
2007; Wadbring and Ödmark, 2016). This collaborative sphere has opened a new door into the
exploration of news values, which from a discursive point of view, are not criteria for news
selection...
Despite increasing attention from linguists to mobile communication, voice messages (VMs) remain an area that has not been thoroughly explored (König, 2019). Little is known about the linguistic design of audio postings and users' perspectives on this mode of communication. This paper aims to bridge this gap by focusing on mode choice in several corpora of WhatsApp chats that contain text and...
On September 16, a 23-year-old Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish Iranian women, died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. This spurred a social movement of epic proportions both on social media as well as offline ; a social movement led by the slogan WomenLifeFreedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi in Persian and Jin, Jiyan, Azadi in Kurdish).
Iranian users took to Instagram and Twitter...
Methamphetamine is a stimulant drug that has been widely portrayed as dangerous in media, policy, and research. This perception has contributed to the stigmatization of people who use the drug, who are often depicted in negative terms. As a result, many individuals who use methamphetamine do so surreptitiously or with the support of like-minded individuals.
This study analyzes the language...
The algorithmic platforms and technologies that vie for our attention have reconfigured how we produce and consume digital culture. They make sure we are entertained, informed, distracted, dazzled, polarized, surprised, persuaded, provoked, depressed and lure us into affective states. They teach us how to live our lives, how other people lead theirs, and how life could also be. They monitor,...
The translocality of online spaces allows groups to gather and discuss – couched comfortably in the (at least) partial anonymity afforded – challenging topics such as inter/intragroup perceptions of ethnicity and race (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2018). This presentation reports on two related case studies in which the Spanish vis a vis Latino identity was relationally co-constructed.
Recent,...
The present contribution engages with the larger topic of discourse and politics through as-sessing live blogging (LB; Thurman & Walters, 2013) as a form of web-native (political) jour-nalism. Discourse practices in online reporting have been found to be characterized by hybridity in terms of (i) sticking to strategic rituals of objectivity to create accountability on the one hand (e.g. Singer...
Online advertising has experienced significant growth in recent years, with social media influencers serving as a vital marketing tool (Hassan, 2021) for beauty brands seeking to promote their advertising campaigns and persuade their target audiences to purchase their products. While previous research has explored the influence of gender on online consumer attitudes towards particular brands...
Keywords: newspaper, headlines, emotions, disaster news, tabloids, broadsheets, invoked, described.
While described emotion can be identified rather precisely in news items “it is much more difficult to get to grips with the emotion that is actually invoked in the reader” (Ungerer 1997: 307): The potential discrepancy between invoked and described emotion poses substantial...
Conversations about the relevance of humanities research for socio-ecological transition require interdisciplinary approaches to investigate how culture ‘models’ climate futures. The trinational project Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models (CCM) addresses this desideratum by investigating climate imaginaries in different domains while utilizing an innovative...
A large part of smartphone communication, such as WhatsApp messages, involves relational work, or language geared towards interpersonal connection (Locher & Watts, 2008; Yus, 2021). This relational investment can be observed, for example, in responses—i.e., listener responses, like right and that’s amazing (Gardner, 2001). However, studies to date have focused on response use in spoken...
Online petitioning is part of nowadays ‘repertoire of claim-making routines’ (Tilly 2006:34-35), and the existing variety of petitioning platforms brings it within anyone’s reach. This entails extremely diverse formulations and tones in the text of the petitions, compared to the paper genre. Moreover, the text of the petition itself is more than a text: it contains hyperlinks, hashtags,...
The current study investigates the intersection between crowdsourcing apps and postdigital affective polarization of online affiliated communities as manifested in the mobile app safecity. Safecity is a mobile app that crowdsources personal stories of harassment occurring in public spaces. The app’s interface affords narratives of anonymous victims relating incidents of sexual abuse which are...
The aim of this presentation is to explore what kind of legitimation strategies are used to defend living in the countryside in Finnish online discussions. By legitimation we refer to the ways of making the countryside and country lifestyle seem like acceptable in the discussions. The data consists of 46 blog posts and their comments from 17 Finnish lifestyle-blogs and a total of 150...
While social media discourse is the object of a growing number of studies, relatively little attention has been given to discursive formats that showcase spoken communication via videos posted to social media platforms. In this paper, I focus on examples of “digital oratory”, and notably “social media oratory” (Rossette-Crake, 2022). These qualify as new types of public speaking in that they...
This research presents a work in progress of a doctoral thesis that aims to understand how the discourse of feminist collectives and associations in Brazil and Portugal contribute to the construction of collective identities in digital context. The chosen methodologies are Critical Discourse Analysis from a sociocognitive perspective (van Dijk, 2009) and netnography (Kozinets, 2014). The...
It has been widely noted that many interactions in the digital sphere are characterized by extensive linguistic playfulness and other semiotic creativity (Vásquez 2019) that often results in the users’ construction of complex forms of humour and participation in diverse humorous online discourses. In this area, much attention has been paid to memes as one of the most characteristic forms of...
When studying digital discourse researchers initially focused on discourse enabled by and found on digital media. Increasingly, digital discourse analysts shifted attention to the interaction between humans and digital media in the realization of digital discourse. Digital discourse in these novel approaches is understood as a socio-technical assemblage. Digital platforms not only enable and...
In 2014 the self-proclaimed feminist app dating Bumble emerged with a mission to disrupt traditional gender dating practices and empower women through a turn taking protocol in which only women may initiate conversations with men after matching. However, in-depth interviews with forty-five Bumble users suggest that connecting and conversing is complicated by gendered online dating practices...
A key evidential aspect of legal proceedings on many potential sexual offences is whether there was ‘sexual consent’. However, as Haworth (2017) indicates, verbal accounts of the disputed events often represent the only evidence, suggesting that subjective understandings of ‘consent’ can thoroughly influence the outcome of a legal procedure. In the context of heterosexual relationships,...
Since their debut as Unicode character set in 2010, emojis became an integrated part of digital communication. While many studies have tried to pin down emojis’ meanings and affordances, it is clear that they are multimodal in their own right and can serve different purposes in different instances. This article demonstrates, by ethnographically studying multiple emojis discussed on Twitter,...
In this paper, we will build on, enhance and refocus previous work (Author, forthcoming 2023) on the social media discourse of supporters for populist parties in the context of European elections. In a series of case studies, we identified what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of...
Even during crises, news headlines not only communicate objective information but they also express attitudes and emotions through different linguistic markers of evaluation. When readers mainly browse news feeds instead of a thorough reading of articles, digital news headlines have a significant role in creating certain types of images on newsworthy subjects (see e.g., Mustafa-Awad &...
Since Ukraine’s independence (1991), its politicians, academics, and citizens have debated the role of Russian in a new democracy (Kulyk 2014). After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian in Ukraine has transformed from “the language of a neighbor to that of an enemy” (research participant). This study, drawing on a larger dataset that includes interviews...
Internet meme is one powerful communicative tool on the internet that people use to interact with each other. An internet meme renders itself through cultural transmission where sometimes more than what is presented is being communicated. Internet memes contain inside jokes, parodies, popular culture references or catch phrases that sometimes require background knowledge of those within the...
In recent years, body positivity has become a popular phenomenon on social media. As a social movement that challenges mainstream media’s beauty standards and increases the visibility of marginalized bodies, body positivity is now a prominent research topic (e.g., Brathwaite & DeAndrea, 2022; Sastre 2014). However, studies that focus on the discursive and linguistic features of body positive...
First launched in Spring 2020, Airbnb now offers a wide range of “Online Experiences” (OEs). Among the most popular OEs are those related to food (cooking, baking or food/beverage tasting classes). In this study, we focus on how the hosts of these culinary OEs engage in digital self-promotion to discursively construct their professional expertise – especially their culinary knowledge.
The...
Abstract:
As a recent phenomenon in Chinese digital spaces, feminist vlogging renders large attention in media academia. Previous research understood this phenomenon as a global expansion of neoliberalism. However, little attention is paid to the interactive strategies and discursive patterns the vloggers apply on different platforms. This research argues that postfeminism in China is...
The burkini – a full-body swimsuit worn for modesty while swimming in public – made waves in 2018 after German news media reported that a public high school in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region had provided the garment to female students for class use. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine a corpus of online user-generated comments (n=3,606) made ‘below the line’ to articles...
It has become standard practice for companies to interact with their customers and followers via video-based social media, in particular Instagram (e.g. Liebrecht et al. 2021), and to perform webcare, “online damage control” (van Noort et al. 2012). Recently, the video-based social medium TikTok has gained in popularity as a interaction platform, with a focus on spontaneous, fast-paced, often...
Digital platforms have become sites of contestation on issues as diverse as health, politics, gender, and science. Opposing sides express their antagonism in the form of combative hashtags, hate speech, memetic humor and other forms of weaponized discourse. These contestations are propelled by, but also reproduce, the attention economy—the competition for visibility between multiple actors...
Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022, a large number of users started “migrating” to the decentralised social media platform Mastodon, part of an open source network of social media servers known as the Fediverse. We argue that the rise of Mastodon is a grass-roots resistance practice in response to the new, over-centralised configuration of Twitter in the hands of one...
There is no doubt that Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) is becoming increasingly visual (Herring, 2019). Graphical elements or graphicons, that is, emoticons, emojis, stickers, short videos, and GIFs (Herring & Dainas, 2017), have played an essential role in the visual transformation of digital communication. Consequently, an increasing number of publications have dealt with these...
In this presentation we analyse selected posters from the corpus of 20 official posters announcing the Independence March organised in Poland on the National Independence Day (11th November) in the last 12 years. The posters function both in a traditional paper form as well as in the digital space. It is the online environment, however, that affords their spread and availability to the public...
During the last two decades a robust body of knowledge on chemsex has been produced. Mainly, there has been three sources: psychobiomedical studies (epidemiology), critical studies of chemsex (cultural studies) and art (documentaries, podcast, among others). Where art has not had much visibility. Chemsex has been defined as drugs use for the purpose of enhancing and lengthening sexual...
In order to raise the healthcare system to a digital standard, the German government established 2021 a national health-app, the „electronic patient file“ (ePA). In this app patients as record keepers are given an active role in the production and feeding information into the newly established digital infrastructure. This new role of the patient opens up a large field of discussion, conflict...
With the spread of social media, discussing mental health has become less stigmatized. Narratives addressing mental struggles now appear even on the accounts of those influencers who previously chose to demonstrate a flawless image. The language and discursive strategies that influencers use to communicate mental health on various platforms both shape and reflect society’s attitude to open...
Comprehending climate change is difficult given its severity and far-reaching nature. Likely for this reason, studies applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory have been popular within discourse-analytic work on climate change. Such work to date has identified four prominent metaphorical conceptions for communicating climate change: as CONFLICT, RELIGION, ILLNESS and JOURNEYING (e.g. Atanasova &...
Dear ADDA 4 organisers,
Please find attached our panel proposal with interested participants in a single PDF file.
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Best wishes,
Birte Bös, Carolin Schneider and Michael Wentker
This paper leans on the thematic dimensions of gender and multimodality to explore how Instagram users construct Parisian narratives at the ‘Café de Flore’ geotag. Employing a sociolinguistic and social-semiotic framework, the present study discusses a corpus of 75 posts tagged at Café de Flore between January 1st and January 31st, 2022. Two research questions were identified for this purpose,...
Parenting discourses in Dutch society are gendered, with mothers still being presented as the most natural and competent caregivers for children. Yet, with the rise of social media it is argued that hegemonic gendered discourses are more ‘effectively’ negotiated. Despite the continued overrepresentation of women on parenting pages some studies indicate that the discursive representation of...
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many political parties and leaders adopted an anti-lockdown rhetoric that was aimed at gaining traction over the popular classes affected by public health restrictions. That was the case of Reform UK, the right-wing populist party formerly known as the Brexit Party in the United Kingdom whose leaders adopted a hardline stance against the coronavirus-related measures...
Over the last three decades, the practices of finding love and sex have increasingly become mediated by digital dating platforms, notably in the US, Europe, India, and China (Buchholz, 2022). This panel attends to calls for more robust research methods to understand “how sexual and romantic relations are established and negotiated in discourse” (Mortensen, 2015). To theoretically and...
The internet and social media have played a key role in the development of 21st Century atheism (Smith & Cimino 2012; Taira 2021). Atheism has had a strong presence on YouTube since its founding in the mid-2000s, which coincided with the rise of the new atheism movement, and the video platform remains a significant space for atheist discourse to this day.
This paper looks at how atheist...
Celebrity pregnancy experiences are a common topic in entertainment media and popular magazines, which tend to represent them by consistent scrutiny of the pregnant and postpartum body (Sha and Kirkman 2009, Bedor & Tajima 2012, Gow et al. 2012) and by racializing and exoticizing celebrity pregnancy and motherhood (Tsaliki 2019).
This paper presents an ongoing study about the representation...
The research presented here analyses how online news reader commenters verbally depict climate change effects concerning wildlife, animal-life and plant-life, doing so diachronically over a fifteen year period until the present day. More specifically, the approach adopted is a broadly corpus-assisted discourse studies one (Partington et al., 2013), where approximately 7,000 instances of...
This panel is devoted to critically exploring how (various types of) expert identities are discursively construed and negotiated in digital discourse (Thurlow & Mroczek 2011, Bou-Franch & Blitvich 2019). Argumentative discussions on social media are marked by the relative absence of contextual cues that would allow interactants to evaluate the credibility of information presented; in collapsed...
This paper reports on different forms of (non)normative gendered self-positioning and respective negotiations in participatory online spaces relating to period discourse (Frank, 2020). Period discourse, here, is chosen as an appropriate backdrop against which to study strategies of positioning that disrupt cis-gendered norms. Following a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach, the study...
To date, research on self-praise has highlighted mostly the pragmatic contingencies of self-praise in Western and Asian discourse. This study examines how self-praise is linguistically and multimodally realized on Arabic Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok. In addition to identifying various types of self-praise speech acts constructed on Arabic social media platforms, the study explores...
In times of highly mobile people and globalised societies, the use and functions of regional and minority languages change. Instead of only serving communicative purposes, they are often also utilised to construct individual or shared group identities, as well as being used as markers for authenticity (Pietikäinen et al., 2016). Markers of identity and authenticity can be used in various ways,...
In this presentation, I will report the findings of a larger discourse-ethnographic study of social media influencers (SMIs) as new-generation copywriters. Located at the intersection of critical sociolinguistics and digital discourse studies, my study considers the extent to which SMIs disrupt conventional practices of advertising (cf. Thurlow, 2020, 2018). The empirical basis of my...
When Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Internet-meme-platforms, like 9gag.com, were dominated by posts concerning the war for months. Especially in times of crises like these, Internet memes as “beacons of public opinion […] signify which collective and national identities receive approval” (Denisova 2019: 5) and therefore impact and shape public...
Human beings, and certain social institutions too, act as epistemic agents in a variety of practices involving the impartation of information. Depending on its quantity, reliability, trustworthiness, relevance, timeliness, convenience, helpfulness and usefulness, informers are granted epistemic trust or deprived of it, i.e. they are regarded as reliable and trustworthy informers. If informers...
The on-demand ride services have drastically changed with the advent of the so-called “sharing economy,” enabled by smartphones and their networked potentials (Anderson, 2016). As users have shifted from taxis to using more app-verified ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft, so too have consumers’ expectations about their in-car interactions with their drivers. In light of this social...
Attested as an effective resource for the construction of identity (e.g., Schiffrin, 1996), storytelling also represents an important avenue for research into digital discourse and, more specifically, self-presentation on social media. To zoom in on this area of research, in this paper I adopt a narrative-discourse perspective and explore the role of stories in the self-presentation of a...
In Hong Kong, “celebrity tutors” teach in shadow education, the private tutoring of school subjects outside school hours (Bray, 2010). They become famous for not only their supposed expertise in examination skills, but also their frequent advertising activities. Previous research (e.g., Koh, 2016) has shown that in advertisements, tutors use exaggerated words such as ‘kings’ and ‘gods’ to...
TITLE: The construction of online (inter-/supra-) national identities in times of crisis
PANEL ORGANIZERS: Massimiliano Demata (University of Turin) & Marlene Miglbauer (Pädagogische Hochschule Burgenland)
Recent events such as the COVID-19 epidemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and the violent challenges to the very foundations of democracies such as those in the USA (2021) and Brasil (2023)...
Digitalization has become a central concern in education policy across Europe, with the EU and national policymakers vigorously promoting using digital technologies to enhance learning outcomes. Consequently, policy discourses about the edtech usually lack critical reflection with one-dimensional and enthusiastic representations of technology as pivotal for educational aims and goals, such as...
This study is interested in the multi-faceted relationship between emotionality and authentication in product reviews (Vásquez 2014) on YouTube. Focussing on a corpus of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), taken from two subgenres, tech reviews and beauty reviews, the discourse-pragmatic analysis aims to examine the linguistic repertoire of genre participants to construct subjective and...
Search technology is increasingly ubiquitous in contemporary society. Our reliance upon search engines, coupled with their governance by a few secretive, profit-driven companies, has attracted much attention. Several researchers have problematised the power search engines wield to privilege certain discourses. Little research, however, investigates the day-to-day discursive practices...
Persuasion through visual contents plays a big role in crowdfunding discourse (see e.g. Cudmore & Slattery 2019). This paper focuses on visual contents (pictures, videos, photographs) in the campaign calls of web-based crowdfunding during two worldwide economic crises: the Ukrainian war and Covid pandemic. There are several previous studies analyzing verbal discourse in crowdfunding persuasion...
Early sociolinguistic work which suggested discontinuity in interactional patterns from traditional media and new media has since evolved into work which suggests that the online and offline are not dichotomous as once thought but are in fact “porous” (Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, 2016) and fluid. Interaction is thought to be mediated by “polymedia repertoire” (Tagg & Lyons, 2021), as...
Twitter as a digital mode of communication is used by political leaders to express emotions, give information and report happenings to a huge audience, instantly. Since there are no clear models for analyzing political tweet genres, a genre analysis of political tweets becomes difficult. Having such models, empowers analysts in revealing the purposes and strategies behind the politicians’...
Our study focuses on persuasive discourse on the subreddit “Change My View” (CMV). This community on Reddit understands itself a site for reasoned debate – perhaps a counterpoint to the polarisation that arguably sets the tone in other social media debates. Part of the debating culture on CMV is a validation system for persuasiveness, which is called delta. Original posters (OPs) put...
A 2021 report by Estyn revealed that around half of children and young people (CYP) across 35 schools in Wales have experienced some form of peer-on-peer sexual harassment. While this phenomenon can occur in face-to-face settings, it increasingly occurs online and after school (Estyn, 2021). Despite the prevalence of this behaviour, CYP tend not to disclose any instances of it. This is in part...
As an important component of authentic leadership, trustworthiness is omnipresent in the context of leaders of social responsibility and their social media presence. While essentialist views of trustworthiness and authenticity have dominated early scholarship, emerging perspectives argue that such values are constructed discursively (Clifton et al., 2020). Thus, being informed by such previous...
Virtual reality (VR) is a peculiar, participatory-oriented narrative medium. Bringing together narrative elements, virtual affordances, and participants’ embodied interactions, VR movies instantiate new narrative techniques by offering an postdigital immersive experience. What is unique about this narrative medium is the ways in which participants take part in the narration event itself by...
Users of dating apps are caught in an epistemic conflict when designing their linguistic self-presentation online (Tagg, Seargeant & Brown 2017) to create a favourable impression without appearing inauthentic and, thus, insincere. Deception is, indeed, very common in online dating(Markowitz & Hancock 2018); conversely, credible app profiles are decisive for drawing potential matches’ interest...
One of the most interesting proposals of cognitive pragmatics and specifically relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) is the label of ad hoc concepts. In short, on many occasions (if not all), the concept literally coded by a word in a context is not sufficiently relevant and has to be adjusted pragmatically, as a result of which the communicated (and inferred) concept in that context...
Research into online child sexual grooming (OCSG) discourse has focused on offenders (see e.g., Chiang & Grant, 2017; Lorenzo-Dus, 2023; Lorenzo-Dus et al., 2016, 2020, forthcoming). What is lacking is an understanding of how child victims of OCSG interpret offenders’ discourse and its impacts. This study addresses this gap in knowledge through an analysis of children’s emotions in a...
The present study targets laughter in written (digital) settings, focusing on how it can display ‘emotive communication’, i.e., “the intentional, strategic signalling of affective information in speech and writing” (Caffi & Janney 1994, 328). More specifically, it looks at the character ‘w’ (which comes from the first letter of the transcription in the Roman alphabet of 笑 wara ‘laugh’ and...
In conventional medicine, the term ‘detox’ refers to a medical procedure addressed to people with life-threatening drug addictions; however, the term has been hijacked by alternative medicine to sell treatments that allegedly rid our bodies of all sorts of toxins (Harvard Health, 2008). This paper looks at the intersection between scientific and pseudo-scientific narratives in the online...
Maria Cristina Paganoni
Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations
University of Milan
mariacristina.paganoni@unimi.it
‘Travel Back Better’: Digital Discourses of Sustainable Tourism
The concept of ‘travelling back better’ that imbues the post-pandemic global tourism industry emphasises the urgency of sustainable tourism practices. As a matter of fact, today...
Violence against Women in Politics has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of research of global relevance (Esposito and Zollo 2021). The present paper aims to contribute to it by adopting a linguistically-anchored, doubly contrastive angle to the study of gendered-based online aggression. Borrowing our conceptual tools from language aggression and impoliteness research (Bou-Franch 2014;...
First Author (Presenting author): Yi Zhang, Department of Languages and Literatures, Delaware State University, USA. Contact e-mail address: yzhang@desu.edu
Second Author: Wei Ren, School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, China
Third Author: Luoxiangyu Zhang, World Languages Department, University of South Florida, USA.
Fourth Author: Yuanbo Liu, School of Foreign Languages,...
Internet users are increasingly using conversational chatbots as companions, friends, and even romantic partners. So far, studies have explored possible benefits and dangers of using social chatbots (Depounti et al. Natale 2022) by applied social and psychological theoretical frameworks, as well as drawing on data from user interviews or online fora (Skjuve et al. 2022). Existing research has...
An important part of online communication consists of interaction between individuals who do not know about each others’ social backgrounds. As participants in such communication often do not claim professional expertise, acquired through formal education and professional practice, lay expertise, acquired through informal education (self-study) and everyday experience (sufferer, participant,...
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, social media memes have once again reestablished themselves as a powerful tool for capturing reality, topicalizing political critique, and taking a stance. As memes are easily created, modified, and shared, they enable internet users to quickly react to ongoing events. Humor that feeds memes also serves as a tool of resistance in...
This study explores the ways in which discourses surrounding gender, race, and privilege are constructed as irrelevant or inappropriate in certain online comment sections. The comment sections used in the study relate specifically to mainstream news articles covering the disappearance and murder of two separate women, one in the US and one in the UK. Both stories received high levels of media...
According to Save the Children, 1 out of 5 teenagers in Spain has been a victim of online child sexual grooming (OCSG). OCSG is a practice of communicative manipulation: groomers use language and other semiotic means, such as emojis (McMahon & Kirley, 2019), to lure their victims into sexual behaviour online and at times offline (Lorenzo-Dus et al 2016; 2020). Groomers’ linguistic strategies...
Digital platforms have become an important resource in health communication, fostering not just an exchange of information beyond institutionalised doctor-patient talk (cf. Kleinke 2015), but also the emergence of digital Communities of Practice (CofP) where participants bond over shared emotional experiences mainly, but not exclusively, connected to their medical conditions. This can, for...
Commercial voice assistants are programmed using standardized, normed, and mostly European languages, reflecting a monolingual bias. The heterogeneity of communicative Arabic practices is viewed as an "issue" for computational processing (Fuad and Al-Yahya 2022:23855). Therefore, major commercial companies opt for the use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a predominantly written language,...
