Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media

Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics

by Crispin Thurlow (Editor), Kristine Mroczek (Editor)

Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies like instant messaging, textmessaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, gaming, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, and French). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists, including genre, style and stance. With commentaries from the two most internationally recognized scholars of new media discourse (Naomi Baron and Susan Herring) and essays by well-established scholars and new voices in sociolinguistics, the volume will be more current, more diverse, and more thematically unified than any other collection on the topic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics

408 pages, ebook

First published September 28, 2011

Reviews

[dangerous at every speed]

would've enjoyed it a lot more if it had been updated more recently! social media changes so much in a year, let alone over 10 years.

[Laurel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue my exploration of academic writing on Internet Studies, this time from a sociolinguistic perspective. I confess that I am torn about the research presented in this volume. Some of it was fascinating and very helpful in understanding digital discourse, in particular the work around memes and convergent media platforms.

I appreciate the idea that the editors made a point of showcasing work from many different countries. The problem I have with some of the analyses (and I will be criticized for saying this) is that there are no allusions to how the findings can be used in an applied sense. I have this same challenge with a lot of mass comm and interpersonal literature. I would have liked to read more discourse on how theory-building around "e-grammar" can be used IRL. The final commentary by Susan C. Herring is enlightening in that she points out that "researchers would do well to take a step back form the parade of passing technologies and consider more deeply the question of what determines people's use of mediated communication" (p. 346).