Innovations and Challenges in Social Media Discourse Analysis

Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest is in exploring ambient affiliation in the discourse of social media using social semiotic, multimodal, and corpus-based methods. She is a co-editor of the journal Visual Communication. Key books include Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse (2018) and Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (2012). Recent co-authored books include Researching the Language of Social Media (2014; 2022, Routledge), Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics (2021), and Emoji and Social Media Paralanguages (2024).Andrew S. Ross is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canberra. His research focuses on the use of (multimodal) critical discourse analysis in social media discourse. His work includes the edited volumes The Sociolinguistics of Hip-Hop as Critical Conscience: Dissatisfaction and Dissent (2018) and Discourses of (De)Legitimization: Participatory Culture in Digital Contexts (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society; Discourse, Context & Media; Language and Communication; and Social Media + Society.

“Why do we spend so much time on social networking apps? What are we doing there? In this book Zappavigna and Ross consolidate their pioneering work on ambient affiliation – insightfully explaining from a social semiotic perspective how words and images negotiate our relationships as we live our lives on-line.”Jim Martin, University of Sydney, Australia“Innovations and challenges in social media discourse analysis: Exploring ambient affiliation and social media paralanguage' brings together the field-shaping work on ambient affiliation and paralanguage in a one-stop, cutting-edge exploration of how our everyday interactions create and contest social connections between us. Drawing on a wide range of social media, the book provides an in-depth exploration of language, selfies and emojis. Situated firmly within the Systemic Functional Linguistics, this book is a landmark publication that will be of interest to scholars seeking to analyse the crucial topic of how interpersonal communication works in social media.”Ruth Page, University of Birmingham, UK

• AcknowledgementsCreditsList of acronyms and abbreviationsChapter 1 - IntroductionChapter 2 - Searchable TalkChapter 3 - Construing ValuesChapter 4 - Ambient Affiliation - Communing and NegotiatingChapter 5 - Intersubjectivity and Self-representation in Multimodal Social MediaChapter 6 - Social Media Paralanguage: Emoji in Social Media Communication Chapter 7 - Conclusion: Ambient Affiliation as Semiotic LabourIndex