Routledge Focus on Language and Social Media – serie

This book advocates a new post-digital linguistic ethnography approach to unpacking mobile communication and enabling a more informed understanding of individuals’ communicative practices in cities today. Drawing on data from a group of ordinary working people, multilingual individuals from superdiverse cities across the United Kingdom, the volume brings observations from this data together to form a new concept of ‘resourcefulness’ as a means of explaining the emergent sense of agency individuals develop towards remediating existing forms of technology in their everyday lives. The book in turn establishes the notion of the ‘networked individual’ by way of demonstrating the ways in which communicative practices cross spaces and platforms. Further chapters detail examples to highlight resourcefulness at work in enabling more efficient business communication, routes to self-expression and the creation and development of social support systems, while a concluding chapter looks at both the limitations and possibilities of resourcefulness and directions for future research. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and media and communication studies.

Language, Gender and Parenthood Online explores the digital interactions of parents on the UK-based internet discussion forum Mumsnet Talk, a space dominated by users sharing a common identification as women, parents and mothers. Using a qualitative approach grounded in feminist poststructuralist theory, Jai Mackenzie uncovers ‘common-sense’ assumptions about gender and parenthood, explores the construction of gender and parenthood in digital contexts and how discourses of gendered parenthood are negotiated, resisted and subverted. This is key reading for students, scholars and researchers in the field of language and gender, as well as language and digital communication.

This book examines antagonistic fan communication on Chinese social media, focusing on the sociolinguistic dimensions and digital strategies in fandom discourse of Chinese celebrities to engage in broader questions around language, social media, and fan culture.The volume explores the different factors which contribute to antagonism in these contexts, including competitive fan posting meant to boost celebrities’ positive publicity, but also at fans’ communicative practices themselves. Adopting an action-centered sociolinguistic framework, Hou considers how antagonistic fan communication transforms as fans’ engagement with digital technologies transforms and their experience with mediated content deepens. The book takes an in-depth look into how fans use a mix of verbal aggressions, such as trolling, with savvy digital tools, such as identity masking and memes to avoid content removal, in order to mobilize, collaborate, and communicate on a wider scale and, often times, funnel those energies into digital activism events. Hou shows how the study of such discourses can not only reveal fresh insights into the state of fandom culture and political communication online but also directions for future research on language and social media.This book will be of interest to scholars in digital communication, sociolinguistics, digital media studies, discourse analysis, and celebrity studies.

This book advocates a new post-digital linguistic ethnography approach to unpacking mobile communication and enabling a more informed understanding of individuals’ communicative practices in cities today. Drawing on data from a group of ordinary working people, multilingual individuals from superdiverse cities across the United Kingdom, the volume brings observations from this data together to form a new concept of ‘resourcefulness’ as a means of explaining the emergent sense of agency individuals develop towards remediating existing forms of technology in their everyday lives. The book in turn establishes the notion of the ‘networked individual’ by way of demonstrating the ways in which communicative practices cross spaces and platforms. Further chapters detail examples to highlight resourcefulness at work in enabling more efficient business communication, routes to self-expression and the creation and development of social support systems, while a concluding chapter looks at both the limitations and possibilities of resourcefulness and directions for future research. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and media and communication studies.

This book investigates the processes and products of the language work of social media influencers (SMIs) and copywriters in the advertising industry.Olivia Droz-dit-Busset examines the mediatised discourses, metadiscourses, and working processes of SMIs and copywriters, exploring how SMIs might be considered as “new-generation” copywriters. The volume makes the case for not only exploring the advertising textual products created by these wordsmiths (i.e. relatively elite language workers) but also the underpinning workflows behind them. In doing so, Droz-dit-Busset reveals how SMIs’ and copywriters’ strategic use of frame-shifting, voice work, and professional labelling illuminates broader transformations in how language work and labour more generally, is valued, organised, and legitimised in contemporary digital economies.This essential volume will appeal to scholars in sociolinguistics, digital media studies, and professional communication, as well as practitioners interested in understanding how new forms of language work are reshaping traditional advertising and marketing practices in the social media age.