This article explores media literacy practices in children’s everyday lives and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic media literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on video recordings documenting the activities in which four target children, aged 6-7 years old, participated at home and in school. Through the detailed analysis of two mundane media literacy activities – online calling and word processing – similarities and differences in media usage within and out-of-school are examined. It is shown how children’s media literacy activities encompass verbal, embodied and social competencies that are made relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in interaction between the adults and children in the form of norms and guidelines for what constitutes knowledgeable participation in media literacy activities, and that are appropriated and reactualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings show how the participants coordinate their actions on and in front of the screen and where spatiality and temporality are oriented to as crucial aspects of the organization of the activities. Moreover, it is demonstrated how old and new technologies are linked together in culturally and historically embedded conceptualizations of literacy.
Scholars have shown that representations of nature are common on food packaging, often to sell products that are far from natural. They have also shown that brands can add value to products using nationalist messages. However, much less research has gone into how these representations take form in specific national settings. In this article, using multimodal critical discourse analysis, I investigate a sample of Swedish food packaging, and show how the nature represented evokes associations established systematically by governments building up nationalist imagery associated with social democracy, openness, freedom, responsibility, equality and fairness. I argue that at a time when Sweden is moving to the right politically, becoming a model neoliberal society, such representations, used for marketing purposes, help communicate a banal sense that Sweden is very much as it always has been.
This study examines the genre of YouTube reaction videos as a distinct form of cultural production and social influence in online communication. Despite its prevalence and popularity, the genre has received limited scholarly attention, particularly with regard to reactions to ideological activism. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting a social semiotic discourse analysis of videos reviewing the activism of transgender community on TikTok. The analysis demonstrates how intersecting non-verbal and technologically enabled modes, such as gaze, gestures, facial expressions, and various audio-visual effects, contribute to the expression of impoliteness arising from a sense of superiority over the target, shared with non-targeted viewers. Overall, the paper provides insights into the dynamics of online culture wars and the multimodal manifestations of impoliteness in contemporary social media discourse.
This article is an investigation of the use of English-language swear words by Swedish, non-native speaker PewDiePie in the context of self-recorded, Let’s Play horror videos uploaded to the video-sharing website, YouTube. Situating PewDiePie within the greater media landscape to establish both his success and notoriety, this article addresses the local interpretation of the globalization of English and the use of English swear words in Swedish media. The practice of swearing in the gaming context is discussed, and swearing instances in a selection of three of PewDiePie’s horror game videos are analyzed. The article puts forth the argument that the use of English swear words contributes to the performance of PewDiePie as a specific, online persona, one that is both in line with the context of video gaming and conducive to a para-social relationship, allowing PewDiePie to achieve the overall goals of communicating with his viewers as peers and reducing the social distance between them. The article concludes that PewDiePie’s practice of social swearing not only simulates casual conversation between friends, but actively reduces social distance, creates the illusion of intimacy, and contributes to his unprecedented success on YouTube.
The working conditions of nurses in the Swedish healthcare system are often debated in the news media, where the various stakeholders' (nurses, union, politicians and healthcare managers) versions of events are laid out. By using social media, nurses can participate in the debate and in a political process by drawing on narrative elements as responses to politicians' and healthcare managers' neglect of the nurses' situations. This article reports on a study of 50 topic driven blogs written by nurses from 2013 to 2015 and published on the website of a union magazine for healthcare professionals. Departing from a discursive narrative approach, the aim of the study is to analyse how the nurses narrate their working conditions and what they convey. The study shows that the bloggers create a we-ness by constructing and displaying their professional identity, illustrating unfair working conditions, conveying criticism and negotiating responsibility and blame. Addressing other nurses, the bloggers presume that others in the profession experience similar things in their workplaces and thereby encourage them to take action and make the injustices known. In order to gain credibility for the reported events and the relations, rhetorical resources such as factual accounts, categories, pronouns and a media discourse are used. The media discourse that is (re)produced in the blogs and elsewhere may result in nurses being trapped in their way of talking about their working situation, normalising it and having difficulty finding solutions.
This article explores the construction of ordinary expertise as a joint venture between experts and advisees in a Swedish makeover television show aired since 2006, Lyxfällan (Eng. The Luxury Trap). This show is also an exponent of belligerent broadcasting (Higgins et al., 2011) and circulates a discourse of consumption which promotes an individualistic consumer ideal.
Drawing on methodological approaches from studies of broadcast talk as talk-in-interaction and multimodal discourse analysis, the article examines the ways in which performances by advisers, advisees and an unseen narrator are made to work together to construct ordinary expertise. The analysis reveals that Lyxfällan’s construction of ordinary expertise heavily relies upon advisers and advisees both following and breaking the general norms of ordinary conversations and the sociability of broadcast talk (Scannell, 1996), as well as the more specific conventions of the participation framework (Thornborrow, 2015) of exchanges between advisers and advisees.
This paper examines how snack brands represent themselves as producers of healthy food through corporatestories on their websites. The increased emphasis on health in ‘‘the new public health era” has createda market for products promoted as healthy or with some kind of wellbeing association. Riding onthis trend, many companies have emerged and positioned themselves as providing good food options.Employing the theory of social semiotics and using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we ask the following questions: How do these companies use corporate stories to make themselves appear as a better alternative than their competitors? How do they make their products appear healthy and attractive to consumers? And how can this kind of marketing help consumers choose healthier products? The analysis of 22 corporate stories of healthy snack companies shows that healthy eating is colonized by a moral discourse for marketing and branding purposes. Furthermore, the health qualities these companies claim to have are abstract, symbolic, and commercialized. We argue that these corporate stories provide no meaningful indication as to the healthiness of these products and can mislead consumers to consume less healthy food while having the intention to eat healthily.
Taking a historical perspective (1982–2005) and using a multimodal discourse analysis, this paper explores the performance of ordinary expertise in Swedish cookery programmes. In particular it explores the changing forms of audience address in one particular format, called the novice format, which is crucial to understanding the history of Swedish cookery programmes. Typically this format involves two participants: a presenter who plays the role of a novice cook, posing questions about the ongoing preparation of dishes; and a chef who carries out the cooking, providing expert advice by responding to the questions asked. The analysis shows that over time the performance of expertise goes from taking the form of conversational coaching, to being enacted through small talk, to finally arising through the simulation of an interactional give-and-take between the expert and the viewers. When it comes to the ordinariness of ordinary expertise, this development is paradoxical. In the later series of programmes, when the chef appears more like an ordinary guy, the distance between the expert chef and the viewers is reduced. But at the same time the cooking is decoupled from routines associated with work and domestic chores, and in this sense is becoming less tied to everyday life and more escapist in character.
In many societies, governments have become concerned about diet related illnesses and the huge economic costs of managing them, disseminating information about things like eating, balanced diets and the foods we should avoid in excess. At the same time in our shops and cafes there have been a proliferation of products which carry possibilities for making more healthy choices. Yet research shows that the health-related properties these products offer are largely contradictory, confusing and more about market buzzwords than actual healthy food. And such healthy choices have tended to blur and merge with notions of ethical and moral shopping. In this introduction to a collection of articles on the discourses of good food, we look at some of the research on ‘good food’ showing exactly what a multimodal critical discourse perspective can contribute to the field. We show that closer analysis of product packaging, marketing, cook books, media reports and policy documents can help us to understand how commercial forces are colonizing and shaping our ideas of what it means to be healthy and also to act as good citizens.
This study explores language policy in micro interaction on the online discussion app Jodel. By analyzingmetalinguistic, evaluative comments, this study aims to provide an example of community-based languageregulation. In total, 110 discussion threads in which Jodel users make explicit evaluative remarkson others’ language use are analyzed. Through an analysis of (de)legitimation strategies, the metalinguisticremarks are explored as key discourse elements in the reproduction of language ideologies. The resultsshow that Jodel users promote and uphold a hypercorrect local ideology that, to a large extent, promotesuniformity and traditional standard orthography. Prominent strategies for invoking this local languageideology are humor, repetition, and exposed correction. The metalinguistic comments are used for thepurpose of creating boundaries for inclusion and exclusion of community members on the app.
In Sweden, as in most European countries, antiracist discourses co-exist with new racism and right-wing populism. Self-images as antiracist are maintained through the strategy to deny racism and accusations of racism. This article addresses discourses of racism in a Swedish media debate that started with a YouTuber being accused of using the N-word. Through a categorization analysis of newspaper articles, that report on and debate the incident, the management of accusations and denials, as well as language ideologies and different perspectives on racism, are examined. The analysis shows how the YouTuber, and journalists, deny racism by claiming that the racist expression was an unintentional “gaffe”, thus categorizing the YouTuber as a non-racist. This understanding of racism, as an individual and intentional phenomenon, dominates the debate. However, some debaters advocate a structural discourse of racism, focusing on racist activities rather than racist individuals. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that the media context does not provide room for a nuanced discussion about structural racism and racist language. Instead, the category work indicates that the maintenance of social relations and an antiracist self-image is the core activity of the interaction.
The aim of this study is to analyze multilingual repertoires of young adolescents and the relocalization of manga on Facebook. The focal points of our analysis are: how young adolescents relocalize manga in digital media, the multilingual repertoires these adolescents use in the relocalization of manga, and the manner in which the relocalization of manga and the multilingual repertoires in digital media contribute to indexing the identity of these adolescents.
The results show that digital media opens up for and encourages dialogue through which the identity performances of young adolescents are invigorated. Through their repertoires, the adolescents perform local, global and glocal identities that reflect superdiverse conditions. The participants׳ choice of, e.g., Japanese screen names highlights their indexing of identities in which local and global aspects are blended and where Japanese aspects are highlighted, whereas other heritage cultures are backgrounded. From the adolescents׳ engagement in a global and transnational manga culture, we learn that, in superdiverse conditions, global transcultural flows can affect the lives of adolescents to the extent that these become a central part of their identity performance.
In the article, we propose a sociolinguistic online ethnography approach in which we combine (socio)linguistic ethnography with online ethnography. The study shows how the ethnographic data supports, deepens and nuances the analysis. Sociolinguistic online ethnography thus offers a lens through which we as researchers can access not only multilingual repertoires per se but also the participants׳ voices and interpretations.
This paper presents a case study of a contemporary Swedish gambling ad video from Svenska Spel published on YouTube. The study applies critical multimodal analysis to examine with what communicative strategies the state-owned operator positions itself on the soon-to-be de-regulated Swedish gambling market. The focus in the analysis lies on the linguistic and visual choices used to achieve certain communicative goals in relation to the consumer. The results show that nationalistic and patriotic values are conveyed and used in order to connect to an implied male consumer who is both ‘Swedish’ and of multi-ethnic origin; the latter being positioned as an Other in need of being taught about the Swedish values of fairness, trustworthiness and authenticity. Deleted from the advertisement is anything having to do with gambling as a social practice. Svenska Spel's identity is visually and linguistically converted from that of a gambling company into a philanthropist whose business quite unproblematically gain society and its “Swedish” people. The study raises questions regarding demands for “moderate” gambling advertisements, and suggests that current moderation regulations miss the mark when it comes to identifying and regulating problematic ideological content in seemingly inconspicuously designed gambling advertising.
This Special Issue focuses on how digital media – blogs, tweets, and other digital platforms – are used by researchers, and how these new modes of academic communication have impacted writing practices and language uses in the academy. It brings together research in two related areas of scholarship: academic discourse analysis and literacies research. In this introductory article, we first outline the concept of digital academic discourse as we perceive it in the context of our Special Issue and show how it is related to, and at the same time different from, its “analogue” predecessor. We then continue to discuss the practices surrounding the production of academic texts with the support of digital media, followed by an outline of how both digital academic discourse and related writing practices are tied to the networks, communities and spaces in which they take place. Next, methodological issues in the study of digital academic discourse are considered, and the articles in this special issue are presented in connection to the themes outlined above. We conclude by contextualising the studies reported here within current trends in discourse analytical and sociolinguistic research and identify venues for future studies.
From a discourse analytic framework, this article analyses an online forum in which users give each other support in relation to a medical problem. The article relates sequences of dialogue between active users in this health forum from the perspective of digital literacy, informational support giving and rapport building. Taking into account previous studies on communication via medical forums, support giving and identity construction, this study develops and proposes some key strategies of explication of how knowledge plays a key role and is assigned to establishing contact as well as adapting themselves to other users of the forum. The role of epistemic parts in the forums is displayed through (1) encouraging further interaction, (2) bonding, and (3) attracting eligible dialogue partners. Skilful users are shown to share knowledge with each other in an informal, yet specific and substantial way. Posters are authored in flexible ways through a balance between knowledge input and emotional support giving. Knowledge is thus framed by the effects of the entanglement of epistemic and affective stances - not only by information exchanges.
There has been an increase of food products marketed through buzzwords like organic, 'local', 'recyclable', 'Fair-trade'. These have been described as part of a newer kind of ethical or emotional capitalism, where consumers can align with political issues through acts of shopping. The problem is that such acts replace or shape what we know about, and how we act towards, actual socio-political matters. In this paper, we look at one example of such a product: Oatly, a milk alternative, which brands itself as sustainable and anti-corporate. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytical approach, we want to learn more about how such brands do not actually state details of the socio-political issue alongside which they align (its causes, process, solutions) yet successfully communicate a compelling sense that buying the product is a form of social activism in a way which cleverly implicates consumers to internalize its values and give them a powerful sense of being part of a political moral order. And this is a form of activism which is fun, chic and rather easy.
There has been an increase of food products marketed through buzzwords like organic, ‘local’, ‘recyclable’, ‘Fair-trade’. These have been described as part of a newer kind of ethical or emotional capitalism,where consumers can align with political issues through acts of shopping. The problem is that such actsreplace or shape what we know about, and how we act towards, actual socio-political matters. In thispaper, we look at one example of such a product: Oatly, a milk alternative, which brands itself as sustainableand anti-corporate. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytical approach, we want to learnmore about how such brands do not actually state details of the socio-political issue alongside which theyalign (its causes, process, solutions) yet successfully communicate a compelling sense that buying theproduct is a form of social activism in a way which cleverly implicates consumers to internalize its valuesand give them a powerful sense of being part of a political moral order. And this is a form of activismwhich is fun, chic and rather easy.
A specific kind of performance management model called ‘Balanced Scorecard’ has come to dominate the way institutions are run around the world, oriented to increasing outputs and to ‘quality assurance’. Strategic diagrams emerged out of this model, claiming to break down all institutional parts and processes into a flow-chart forming a sort of road map of the role played by all parts of an organization in reaching targets. Drawing on Fairclough׳s (1992) notion of the ‘technologization’ of discourse and Van Leeuwen׳s (2008) notion of ‘the new writing’ this paper applies multimodal critical discourse analysis to a sample of diagrams from a wider corpus showing how they have changed over time, becoming more abstracted and symbolic, as the performance management discourse itself has become naturalized.
It is now common for public institutions, and other organizations, to be administrated and managed through digital systems. Such systems are aligned with a discourse of positivity, of doing things better, more effectively. In this paper, using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we analyze one digital system used in Swedish preschools called Unikum, built around the national targets in the new national curriculum. Our analysis considers the affordances of the digital system, the uses to which these are put, and the designs of its interfaces. Such systems set up a kind of information infrastructure where things and processes are coded and classified, providing locked-down positions, infused with power, where there is only one way of construing the world. We show how Unikum brings a marketized, customer oriented, ideology of teaching and learning into preschools, displaying a bright and optimistic world where all children are developing. This leads to incredible levels of performativity as teachers must communicate constantly using the codifications carried by the system as if everything was improving. The process comes at a cost of side-lining professional skills and also the very children themselves.
This paper focuses on the role of the news media in the (re)definition of contested environmental issues. It analyzes how the media, by means of various discursive strategies, legitimize or de-legitimize different claims about how to handle environmental issues. Guided by critical discourse analysis, the paper analyzes the news reporting on two cases of insect outbreaks in Sweden: one which resulted in spraying and one which did not. The analysis concludes that the production of hegemonic meaning on contested environmental issues – i.e. the process by which certain definitions of how to understand and manage them emerge victorious from the discursive struggle between stakeholders – is closely linked to journalistic routines, as well as to media logic in general and to the media’s difficulties in handling scientific uncertainty in particular.
This article investigates self-organized peer-to-peer support in online forum discussions about suicide. It analyzes how the discursive strategies through which participants introduce themselves as supporters relate to the support they provide. The analysis shows that the strategies employed to construct supporter identities commonly draw on what has been described as 'somatic individuality' - by which the management of biological 'risks' are framed as individual responsibilities - and by negotiating tensions between different perspectives on suicide. These are; (a) a discourse focusing on psychiatric knowledge and psychopharmaceuticals (b) a discourse focusing on social context and personal relationships, and (c) a critical stance towards the established care system. Negotiations between these condition, and are also conditioned by, power relations in the forum. These dynamics regulate the ways in which participants can use an online forum in order to move away from crisis points by discursively attempting to enter a supporter position.
This paper explores the marketisation of ‘pure’ from the late nineteenth century to modern-day using examples of food packaging and advertising. Adopting a sociohistorical approach to the theoretical perspective of social semiotics, it draws attention to the arbitrariness of the term and demonstrates how, over time, advertisers have constructed a particular discourse that equates the purity of a food product with a physical, mental or spiritual type of purity. In doing so, they invest food with a moral authority and legitimacy that leads consumers to understand commodities through marketing discourses and buy into the lifestyle and cultural value that the product promises, although it may not be true. In emphasising how purity has historically been used as a rhetorical device to sell products, the study hopes to encourage consumers to challenge food advertising and be aware of the myths that it can create in order to become empowered and make informed choices about supposedly healthy products.
In this paper, we will explore, through a narrative-semiotic lens, how 32 Edwardian (1901-1914) celebrities style the ‘self’ in their pictorial bookplates. Using Zhao and Zappavigna (2018a, 2018b, 2020) and Ross and Zappavigna’s (2019) typology of selfies as a starting point and drawing upon aspects of Bamberg and Georgakopoulou’s (2008) positioning analysis, we will embed users’ visual arrangements and narrative stance-taking elements in ethnohistorical insights gathered from archival research. Grounding these choices in evidence from their original sociohistorical context of creation will demonstrate that, like selfies, pictorial bookplates are dynamic multimodal ensembles that enable users to construct multiple identities and achieve different communicative goals. However, it will offer a more nuanced perspective into the relationship between ‘new’ and ‘old’ media, suggesting that, despite the similar forms and functions of pictorial bookplates and selfies, their creation is guided by different ideological values and bounded by the affordances, norms and traditions of the time. The methodology and findings presented in this paper will contribute to the growing body of transhistorical research that is concerned with situating communication technologies in the wider history of technologically mediated change.
The paper is aimed at proving the hypothesis that multimodal construction in video games can follow specific discursive aims in the process of persuading game players. In order to prove this, we have performed a multifaceted analysis which elaborated the ways in which different modalities in a representative video game combine so as to convince the player to act, play, and perhaps think accordingly. The multimodal approach employed in the paper combines the notion of discourse aims and the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Metal Gear Solid (Kojima, 1998), and analyses different narrative strategies and verbal cues, as well as the overall interface, control, and gameplay. The results suggest that verbal and textual cues combine with audio-visual elements and highly specific gameplay strategies in order to refrain the player from killing enemies. This might indicate that video games are likely to possess a great persuasive power, as they are both multimodal and highly interactive.
In this paper, front covers of news magazines are studied as a distinct multimodal genre that invites readers to buy the magazine not only by attracting their attention but also by assuming a position with respect to the particular cover story. In order to account for the argument that a front cover may convey in support of that position, an argumentative reconstruction is required that also needs to take seriously into account the way in which the verbal and the visual modes interact to create meaning. The study proposes a multimodal argumentation perspective on the systematic reconstruction of the arguments that front covers of news magazines put forward. As a case in point, six covers by two German weekly news magazines are analysed, featuring the role of Greece in the eurozone crisis in the period 2010-2012. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.
The focus of this study is on how Twitter users construe talk-like tweeting in metalinguistic utterances. In a material of tweets containing or responding to explicit comparisons of tweeting to talking (N=520), a broad range of construals are identified, showing Twitter users associating talk-likeness with, e.g., notions of the textual representation of voice, of grammatical (in-)correctness, of accurately reflecting one׳s ‘real-life’ identity, and of regional or social variation in language use. These associations frequently serve normative functions, enforcing or contesting linguistic and discursive norms in both serious and playful ways. The findings offer a novel perspective on the oft-debated orality of computer-mediated discourse, providing a window on how a process of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) is instantiated and how language norms are actively negotiated by participants in everyday online language use on Twitter.