DIGITALLY MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Question 1

A HISTORY OF RESEARCH IN THIS AREA

Answer 1

• Computer-mediated communication (CMC) – 1970s onwards
• Computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) – 1990s onwards (Susan Herring)
• “Social media linguistics” – 2010s onwards
• Digitally mediated discourse analysis (DMDA)

Question 2

DIGITAL vs NON-DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

Answer 2

Digitally mediated communication can:
- be faster than written, slower than spoken exchanges
- have multiple participants
- be one-to-many, to an unseen audience, but increasingly is personalised via algorithms
Channels
- Face-to-face: visual, auditory, gestural
- CMD (traditionally) confined to visual & text
Affordances
- The ‘action possibilities’ of technologies

Question 3

CMDA

Answer 3

Herring, 2001
The study of “language and language use in computer-networked environments”; initially a sub-field of “computer-mediated communication” (CMC)

Question 4

LEVELS OF CMDA

Answer 4

Structure: often largely descriptive, time sensitive;
Meaning: it may not be accessible to researches because of familiarity with conventions, resistance to ‘outsiders’ conducting research and high instances of irony, playfulness and sarcasm;
Interaction management: the usual order (e.g. adjacent pairs) can be disrupted, however ‘quoting’ and @mentioning are used;
Social phenomena: social status are hard to understand, these groups quickly establish linguistic norms, and find a way around medium constraints;
Participation: quantitative methods offer a solution for such large quantities of data, but there are problems of ethics, and ethnographies usually give richer insights that, however, are not generalisable
Multimodality: it is a relatively new research area, in which the datasets are very rich; in more complex texts the meanings are harder to access.