Researching Language and Social Media

A Student Guide

Ruth Page, David Barton, Carmen Lee, Johann Wolfgang Unger, Michele Zappavigna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000517965
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide introduces the linguistic frameworks currently used to analyse language found in social media contexts. This highly accessible guidebook outlines the practical steps and ethical guidelines entailed when gathering linguistic data from social media sites and platforms.

In this new edition, the authors update the range of social media interactions used as examples and draw attention to important developments such as "fake news" and new areas of debate such as hate speech. Expanding the geographical and multilingual aspects, this edition also includes examples from Asia and the Arabic-speaking world. With updated methods that help students study the language of social media from a multimodal perspective, the recent uptake in image sharing, video-chat, and graphicons will also be addressed. Each chapter begins with a clear summary of the topics covered and also suggests sources for further reading to supplement the initial discussion and case studies.

This timely book is an essential guide for students of English language and linguistics, media, and communication studies.

Chapter 1What is social media?

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003121763-2

Outline of the chapter

In this chapter, we cover

• How to define social media.
• Social media sites and their place in the wider historical evolution of computer-mediated communication across national contexts.
• The relationship between social media and web 2.0.
• Frameworks used to distinguish the characteristics of social media sites and genres, drawing on the work of Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) and Herring (2007).
• The “social” characteristics of social media.
• The “medium-related” characteristics of social media.

Defining social media

This first chapter considers the object of study which is our main interest, social media, and its relationship to other forms of computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC). We use the term social media to refer to Internet-based sites and services that promote social interaction between participants. Examples of social media include (but are not limited to) discussion forums, blogs, wikis, podcasting, social network sites, content-sharing sites (like the video-sharing site, YouTube and the photo-sharing platforms, like Instagram and Flickr), apps, and virtual worlds. Social media is often distinguished from traditional forms of mass media, where mass media is presented as a one-to-many broadcasting mechanism (such as television, radio, or print newspapers) and from personal forms of private communication (such as telephone conversations). In contrast, social media delivers content via a network of participants where the content can be published by anyone, but still distributed across potentially large-scale audiences.

As our definition suggests, social media is an umbrella term which groups together a seemingly diverse range of forms, with different genres (think of how blogs and discussion forums vary from each other and from social network sites), and social media sites and services which realise these genres in specific ways (compare blogging services such as WordPress and Tumblr, or social network sites like Facebook and Sina Weibo) and a diverse range of communicative channels and text types, some of which can be integrated within the same site. For example, Facebook is primarily a social network site, but it also allows its members to set up private profiles and to join public groups. They can also post semi-public or public updates, comments, or rankings seen by a wider audience of a “Friend list” or everyone who uses the application, send a private email message, or chat online to a single person. Facebook also includes options for livestreaming, stories, voice call, and video call, both between individuals and groups. These options illustrate the different “scales of sociality” (Miller et al. 2016) that people can manipulate within a single application; they can control how many people they interact with, the levels of privacy, and modes through which they communicate. As time has gone by, the convergence of media applications has made it more difficult still to state unequivocally that a particular site is or is not in its entirety an example of social media. For example, online stores can embed links to social media sites (through the now ubiquitous sharing buttons for reposting content to sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others) or have added options for customers to discuss and evaluate goods for sale through reviewer comments and ratings (which can sometimes resemble a blog or forum). The development of super-apps like WeChat (Weixin), which incorporate multiple functions within a single interface (such as banking, retail, sharing updates, files, and sending messages to contacts), further complicates this picture. Given the convergence of media forms on the one hand and the diversity of applications on the other, it is hard to set out a definitive list of technical attributes which could be used to categorise a given application as belonging to or excluded from the set of “social media” in a clear-cut manner. Instead, in the following sections, we begin by setting social media applications in their historical context, then move on to discuss the characteristics associated typically with these social media applications as a way of mapping out the terrain.

Social media in historical context

Although listing the attributes of social media sites definitively is elusive, there is a general consensus that social media platforms can be distinguished historically from other kinds of digitally enabled communication. From this perspective, social media often refers to the range of tools and technologies that began to be developed in the latter years of the 1990s and became sites of mainstream Internet activities in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The chronological context of social media platforms is set out in Table 1.1. The timeline in Table 1.1 suggests the increasingly interactive potential of social media and the increasingly multimodal nature of those interactions. As the list suggests, the conversational nature of social media sites that is often associated with blogs, social networking sites, and content-sharing platforms is also present in earlier forms of online communication. The email lists, bulletin boards, and text messages of the 1980s might be seen as precursors to the communicative channels that characterise twenty-first century Internet behaviour. However, during the mid-1990s there was a decisive shift in the way that social media sites enabled interaction between participants, and placed that interaction in public rather than private or semi-private contexts. Blogs and wikis extended the range of interactive possibilities, with blogs allowing individual writers to connect to other bloggers (through blog rolls, links, and comments) and wikis fostering collective contributions to a single enterprise (Myers 2010). These became mainstream examples of Internet use when sites like Live Journal, Blogger, and later WordPress made it easier than ever for contributors to publish reports and opinions, and Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The years 2003–2006 saw a rapid expansion of social network sites (such as LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) which reframed the dialogic links between participants as a network, increasing the number, visibility, and reach of an individual's connections with others in online spaces. Between the years 2007 and 2012, the increase in visual and audio forms of social media came to the fore, with Instagram, Pinterest, and WeChat all launching in 2010, with Snapchat and Line launching in 2011. These sites and messaging services also enabled further multimodal developments, for example, in the popularisation of stickers and emoji especially in WeChat and KakaoStory.

Table 1.1 Timeline of selected social media platforms

1978	Bulletin Board System
1980	Usenet
1984	SMS concept developed
1988	Internet Relay Chat
1995	eBay, Ward Cunningham coins the term “wiki” and launches first wiki site
1997	John Barger coins term “web log”
1998	Yahoo groups
1999	Live Journal, Blogger
2000	Baidu
2001	Google Groups, Wikipedia, Cyworld, TripAdvisor
2002	Friendster, Last.fm
2003	MySpace, WordPress, Del.ici.ous, LinkedIn, Second Life, Skype, 4chan
2004	Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Orkut, Ben Hammersly coins the term “podcasting,” Tim O'Reilly launches the first “web 2.0” conference
2005	YouTube, Reddit
2006	Twitter, VK
2007	Justin TV, Tumblr, Gowalla
2008	9GAG
2009	Foursquare, Google Wave, Chatroulette, Sina Weibo, Klout, WhatsApp
2010	Instagram, Diaspora*, Quora, WeChat, Pinterest
2011	Google+, Snapchat, Twitch, Line
2012	Tinder, Vine, KakaoStory
2013	“Selfie” is word of the year for the Oxford English dictionary
2016	Douyin
2017	TikTok

The timeline also points to the fast-paced rise and fall of particular sites and services, where some have become defunct (like Friendster) while others have been bought and rebranded, such as TikTok which was first launched in China as Douyin and then merged with Musical.ly. Others have expanded to become international corporations. However, it is important to remember that the rise and fall of particular sites is not universal. There are national and cultural variations in how sites and services are taken up. The timeline we have created is inevitably selective, and cannot include many of the smaller sites and apps (for example, the full range of dating apps is not given here). Although we have mentioned some of the most influential sites from Asian contexts, we have not included them all. No doubt these sites will also continue to evolve across national contexts in the years that follow, and in this second edition of the textbook, we want to recognise the important and exciting work that is exploring social media interactions across a range of national contexts. An example of this is the first of our case studies, by Xiaoping Wu (Box 1.1), who discusses the challenges of exploring data from the Chinese micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo.

Box 1.1 The microblogging discourse of disasters: A case study of the 2015 Tianjin explosions on Sina Weibo

Xiaoping Wu

The case study is part of my research project which explores the discursive-semiotic practices involved in the social construction of realities and that evokes a sense of community in the context of disasters. By analysing 1,322 microblogs posted on Weibo during and after the Tianjin accident in 2015, the study shows how Weibo users mobilised a discursive repertoire of representatives, expressives, directives, commissives, and eliciting to make sense of disasters unfolding in real time, and, in turn, establish a collective response or a “community of engagement” with the disaster.

When conducting the project, the first challenge I encountered was data collection. The Tianjin accident had generated millions of Weibo posts. However, I did not have access to a ready-made database of Weibo and manual data collection was too time-consuming. To solve the problem, I used a Chinese-developed data mining software called “八爪鱼采集器” (Octopus data collection tool; pinyin: bazhuayu caijiqi) to sample and collect data. This software allows researchers to set up programs to automatically browse and capture threads of posts on a social media website. To collect a manageable database, I set the software to capture microblogs appearing on the first page of every hour between 23:00 on August 12 (when the explosions broke out) and 24:00 on August 20, 2015 (when the situation was basically under control). Another issue that concerns data collection is Chinese Internet censorship. By the time I finished data collection, some of the microblogs had disappeared, and thus, I was not able to trace back to the original microblogs and comments left under them.

The second challenge concerns the categorisation and analysis of Chinese multimodal data. When the Tianjin data were collected, the word limit of 140 characters was still applied to Weibo. However, as 140 Chinese characters can convey two or three times the amount of information compared to 140 English letters, a Chinese microblog often performs more than one discourse act. Moreover, the Chinese language has a relatively loose grammatical structure, which means a sentence can include several clauses without conjunctions. In addition, the Tianjin data involve ab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is social media?
• 2 What might a linguist say about social media?
• 3 What does it mean to research?
• 4 What are Internet research ethics?
• 5 Analysing discourse: Qualitative approaches
• 6 What are ethnographic approaches?
• 7 Carrying out a study of language practices on social media
• 8 Collecting social media materials for quantitative projects
• 9 Working with social media data: Quantitative perspectives
• Index