Coffeetweets: Bonding Around the Bean on Twitter
Abstract
This chapter explores how we use social media to communicate our experience of the world and bond with others by forming communities of shared values. Microblogging services such as Twitter and Weibo are a form of social media allowing users to publish streams of length-delimited posts to internet-mediated audiences. As such they afford new kinds of interpersonal interaction via the conversation-like exchanges that occur (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009). An example of a length-delimited post (hereafter ‘micropost’) is the following. It contains one of the most common patterns in microblogging, an expression of thanks for personal endorsement:
@Tim I love #coffee too
This post is addressed to Tim using the @ symbol before the name, a construction which can also function as a reference to the person (e.g. @Tim makes great coffee), and contains a hashtag, the # symbol, which acts as a form of metadata labelling the topic of the post so that it can be found by others. This chapter will consider microposts such as this in terms of how they illuminate the way microblogging as a practice creates alignments around shared quotidian experiences by conferring upon the private realm of daily experience a public audience. The kind of personal expression of the everyday that we see in microposts has never been subject to real-time mass dissemination in the way that we are currently witnessing on Twitter. This chapter focuses on one such personal domain, coffeetalk, that is, discourse relating to coffee as consumed in everyday life.1 I will consider this discourse from two
... However, a persona does not refer to an individual person, but rather is a generalisation of how identities are enacted linguistically. These identities are characterised by particular "coupling dispositions" (Zappavigna, 2014a;Zappavigna, 2014b;Zappavigna, 2018), that is, a tendency to construe particular patterns of values. The linguist Firth (1950) originally referred to the idea of "bundles of personae", that is, how personalities interact in discourse and how one person can enact multiple personae depending on the circumstance they are in. ...
... SFL explorations of personae have also examined shared values in microblogging (Zappavigna, 2014a), as an act of impersonation using paralinguistic and dialogic resources (Logi and Zappavigna, 2021), and as communal identity in conversational exchanges (Knight, 2010b). The work in this thesis interprets personae from the discourse semantic level of SFL, focused on interpersonal meaning enacted by resources from the appraisal and affiliation systems. ...
... Many of the salient visual elements observed in the video frames can also be interpreted as 'bonding icons', that is, symbols that embody particular values which people rally around (Stenglin, 2008;Tann, 2012;Zappavigna, 2014a;Zappavigna, 2014b). ...
Information disorders have become prevalent concerns in current social media research. This thesis is focused on the interpersonal dimension of information disorders, in other words, how we can trace, through linguistic and multimodal analysis, the social bonding that occurs when online communities commune around misinformation and disinformation, and how these social bonds are legitimated to enhance perceived credibility. Social bonding in this thesis refers to a social semiotic perspective on the shared values that communities use to construe alignment with others. False information can spread when groups have a shared vested interest, and so information disorders need to be elucidated through an investigation of sociality and bonding, rather than via logical points alone. The term ‘information disorder’ encompasses the spectrum of false information ranging from misinformation (misleading content) to disinformation (deliberately false content), and it is within this landscape of information disorders that this thesis emerges. Two key forms of social semiotic discourse analysis were applied to a dataset of YouTube videos (n=30) and comments (n=1500): affiliation (analysis of social bonding) and legitimation (analysis of resources used to construct legitimacy). The dataset constituted two contrasting case studies. The first was non-politically motivated misinformation in the form of an internet hoax leveraging moral panic about children using technologies. The second was politically motivated conspiracy theories relating to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. The key findings of this thesis include the multimodal congruence of affiliation and legitimation across YouTube videos, the emergence of technological authority as a key legitimation strategy in online discourse, and the notion of textual personae investigating the complex array of identities that engage with information disorders in comment threads. Additionally, six macro-categories were identified regarding communicative strategies derived from comment threads: scepticism, criticism, education and expertise, nationalism, hate speech, and storytelling and conspiracy. This shows not only how information disorders are spread, but also how they can be countered. The method outlined in this thesis can be applied to future interdisciplinary analyses of political propaganda and current global concerns to develop linguistic and multimodal profiles of various communities engaging with information disorders.
... Thus, personae do not refer to individual people, but rather it is a generalisation of how identities are enacted linguistically. These identities are characterised by particular "coupling dispositions" (Zappavigna 2014a, Zappavigna 2014b, Zappavigna 2018, that is, a tendency to construe particular patterns of values. The linguist Firth (1950) originally referred to the idea of "bundles of personae", that is, how personalities interact in discourse and how one person can enact multiple personae depending on the circumstance they are in. ...
... Identity has been explored from the perspective of iconography (Tann 2011, Tann 2012. Additionally, SFL explorations of personae have been previously explored in terms of shared values in microblogging (Zappavigna 2014a), as an act of impersonation using paralinguistic and dialogic resources (Logi and Zappavigna 2021), and as communal identity in conversational exchanges (Knight 2010b). The work in this chapter interprets personae from the discourse semantic level of SFL, focused on interpersonal meaning enacted by resources from the appraisal and affiliation systems (as will be further explained in the Methodology section). ...
... Until 2017, the message of a tweet was limited to 140 characters. These characterconstrained messages contributed to the use of informal and conversational language since Twitter members had to develop new techniques to express interpersonal meanings in few words (Scott, 2015;Zappavigna, 2014a). As a result, members employed particular strategies of text messaging, such as spelling variation and abbreviations, (Tagg, 2012), and other Twitter conventions like the use of a hashtag (see subsection 1.3.1). ...
... By sharing a hashtag, Twitter members try to appeal to an 'ambient' audience who may align with their views. It is for this reason that social media services are often referred to as phatic media, a term that emphasizes that its members wish to meet and interact with (new) people (Zappavigna, 2012(Zappavigna, , 2014a. ...
This thesis critically traces the linguistic resources and patterns deployed by tweeters to discuss gendered discourses and patriarchal oppression concerning sexual violence. There are two primary aims of this study: 1) to examine tweeters’ discourses and ideologies regarding sexual violence and how they contribute to the negotiation of victim-perpetrator identities, and 2) to identify the role of evaluative language in the (re)production and resistance of gendered discourses and ideologies. To do so, this thesis takes AsJ Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States as a case study. After his nomination was made public, he was accused of attempted rape by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Her allegations were followed by similar claims from two more women. The nomination became a major topic on Twitter as tweeters used different hashtags to express (dis)affiliation. Dr. Ford also became the target of verbal aggression by those who supported his nomination. However, her claims were also supported by tweeters who validated her testimony and, in turn, sparked the re-emergence of hashtag feminism. Two corpora of tweets containing the hashtags #KavanaughConfirmation and #NoKavanaughConfirmation were compiled to analyze and compare each dataset in relation to the objectives of this study. The corpora were investigated from a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach (Partington et al., 2013) which combined corpus linguistic tools with Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) (Lazar, 2005, 2018) and Appraisal Theory (2005). The findings suggest that tweeters invoked discourses relating to gender-based violence to both denounce and perpetuate rape culture and patriarchal oppression in American society. Such discourses contributed to the negotiation of the identities of victims and perpetrators, which were unstable and fluid depending on tweeters’ socio-political groups. Antifeminist and patriarchal discourses were found to contribute to the portrayal of AsJ Kavanaugh as a political victim, thus portraying Dr. Ford as a political aggressor. In contrast, discourses of veracity and feminism gave credibility to Dr. Ford’s testimony and opposed the confirmation. These discourses depicted AsJ Kavanaugh as a liar and a sexual aggressor. On the other hand, the analysis of evaluative language revealed that negative Appraisal resources predominated in both corpora to convey immoral and unethical evaluations and collective emotional distress, which further contributed to the unstable construction of victim-perpetrator identities. All in all, this thesis provides insights into tweeters’ digital practices to discuss gendered dynamics and resist/reproduce patriarchal discourses derived from rape culture. In addition, it also shows the fruitful combination of corpus linguistics methods, FCDA, and Appraisal Theory in the analysis of gender-based violence and social media data.
... Whether through parody or not, enregisterment of the no sabo kid is accomplished through a clear mechanism-the hashtag community (Zappavigna 2014(Zappavigna , 2015. Each video included in the analysis is overtly marked with the name of the social being to which the semiotic features point, namely #nosabokids (or any variation of the hashtag therein). ...
Sociolinguistic styles and the resultant ascribed identities are understood as the product of simultaneous variables, leading to the notion of bricolage, or the co-occurrence of variables and their collective indexical meanings. Relatively little attention has been paid to these processes as they manifest on social media platforms. The goal of the current paper is to understand which linguistic and thematic features co-occur in the online production of the no sabo kid style and identity, which manifests as a form of linguistic discrimination towards U.S. Latinx youth. “Hashtag communities” were used to locate posts about no sabo kids on TikTok (N = 95), and videos were automatically and manually coded for salient linguistic and discursive resources in the online no sabo kid community. The results show the co-occurrence of code-switching and phonological and lexical variation, alongside discursive themes, namely ‘proficiency’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘performative lexical gaps’. I argue that the no sabo kid hashtag community is a mediated manifestation of ideologies surrounding U.S. Latinx bilinguals, where a supposed lack of proficiency in Spanish and grammatical blending of Spanish and English index inauthentic ethnicity. Mediated instantiations of sociolinguistic styles shed light on how linguistic features become enregistered through multimodality and semiotic bricolage.
... El utterance representa un conjunto de fonemas o lexemas; es además una indicación semántica, un plano de la expresión y de la pronunciación, un significante, y una entidad física en la cual el hablante sugiere un sentido o significado sobrentendido para las inferencias (Scott, 2015). Un ejemplo consiste en el empleo de pronombres para resaltar información desde una función jerárquica, como es la acción de direccionamiento a metadatos, con los cuales el comunicador intenta modificar el ambiente cognitivo de los usuarios (Zappavigna, 2014). ...
El profesor checo Josef Dubsky (1917-1996) fue un hispanista que realizó viajes de estudio a Cuba (1963 y 1972) y, especialmente, a la Universidad de Oriente (1969 y 1971-1972). Sus estudios fueron recopilados en Introducción a la estilística de la lengua (1970) y Linguoestilística funcional (1989), ambos publicados por esta Casa de Altos Estudios. El primero de ellos, a poco más de 50 años de publicado es motivo de recordación por el colectivo de la carrera de Letras. Este libro está organizado en dos partes; la primera, constituido por el texto original publicado en 1970 por la Dirección de Extensión Universitaria y Relaciones Culturales de la Universidad de Oriente (UO) –que hoy salvamos como parte de la colección Aniversario–, recoge las ideas de Dubsky, formado en el Círculo lingüístico de Praga, sobre la estilística, métodos, estilos funcionales y sus aplicaciones. Consta de trece capítulos, un apéndice y la bibliografía. La segunda parte aúna trabajos sobre estudios estilísticos y sobre diferentes tópicos lingüísticos de docentes de la UO, la Universidad Central “Martha Abreu” de Las Villas y la Universidad de Lille, Francia.
... More recent studies draw a more nuanced picture and acknowledge the emergence of "creative vernaculars" (Berry, 2015) that can be studied as ongoing processes visible in the production, curation, and sharing of pictures in online repositories. Studies of digital food cultures (e.g., on Twitter, Zappavigna, 2014, or food blogs, de Solier, 2018 have shown that food photography does not only fulfil an aesthetic and illustrative function but is also exploited by social media users for the actual preparation of food, for constructing personal narratives and identities, and for communicating and sustaining social relationships. Within conversation analytic studies, eating and other food-related activities have been traditionally analyzed as an offline activity providing a setting for talk-in-interaction (e.g., Goodwin, 1997), for socialization processes within the family (e.g., Ochs & Shohet, 2006), or, more recently, as related to embodiment and the social and negotiable nature of sensorial experiences (e.g., Mondada, 2009Mondada, , 2021Wiggins, 2013). ...
This article investigates mundane photo taking practices with personal mobile devices in the co-presence of others, as well as “divergent” self-initiated smartphone use, thereby exploring the impact of everyday technologies on social interaction. Utilizing multimodal conversation analysis, we examined sequences in which young adults take pictures of food and drinks in restaurants and cafés. Although everyday interactions are abundant in opportunities for accomplishing food photography as a side activity, our data show that taking pictures is also often prioritized over other activities. Through a detailed sequential analysis of video recordings and dynamic screen captures of mobile devices, we illustrate how photographers orient to the momentary opportunities for and relevance of photo taking, that is, how they systematically organize their photographing with respect to the ongoing social encounter and the (projected) changes in the material environment. We investigate how the participants multimodally negotiate the “mainness” and “sideness” (Mondada, 2014) of situated food photography and describe some particular features of participants’ conduct in moments of mundane multiactivity.
This project investigates English–Spanish codeswitching in internet memes posted to the Facebook page, We are mitú (mitú), and analyzes how lexical insertions and quotatives contribute to the enregisterment of linguistic patterns and the construction of collective identity among U.S. Latinx millennials in virtual social spaces. Data include instances of lexical insertion (n = 280) and quotative mixed codes (n = 114) drawn from a collected corpus of 765 image–text memes. The most frequent lexical insertions included food items (e.g., elote and pozole), kinship terms (e.g., abuelita and tía), and culturally specific artifacts or practices (e.g., quinceañera and lotería), which reflect biculturalism and rely on a shared set of references for the construction of a group identity. Additionally, the quotatives in the data construct Spanish-speaking characterological figures that enregister a particular brand of U.S. Latinx millennial identity that includes being bilingual, having Spanish-speaking parents, and having strong ties to Latinx culture. Overall, this work highlights not only internet memes as a vehicle for enregisterment, but also, and more importantly, how the language resources employed within them work to enregister linguistic and cultural norms of U.S. Latinx millennials, and thereby, play a role in identity construction in virtual social spaces.
In today's digital era, it is important to examine the ways researching in digital spaces differs from the general practice of conducting qualitative research. For this reason, this chapter will consider the work done by researchers to include the ethical considerations, affordances, and constraints of conducting qualitative research in digital spaces. Then, with these points in mind, it will include a specific discussion on the research literature concerning how literacy researchers have studied adolescents' digital work both in and outside of educational spaces. Finally, implications will be shared on the future of research in digital spaces, such as with AI, and what is said and unsaid within the research literature about conducting qualitative research in digital spaces.
Bu çalışmada günümüzde son derece popüler olan mukbang videolarının bireyler üzerinde oluşturduğu motivasyonların belirlenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Araştırmanın örneklemini Eskişehir’ de yaşayan ve mukbang videoları izleyen bireyler oluşturmaktadır. Katılımcıların belirlenmesi aşamasında her görüşme başlangıcında bireylere sosyal medyada bu videoları izleyip izlemedikleri sorulmuş olup izlemeyenler araştırmaya dahil edilmemiştir. Katılımcıların belirlenmesi için basit rastgele örneklem yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Mukbang videoları izleyen 20 kişiye ulaşılmıştır. Araştırmada veri toplama aracı olarak yarı yapılandırılmış 9 sorudan oluşan görüşme formu kullanılmıştır. Görüşmeler 10 - 25 Nisan 2023 tarihleri arasında gerçekleştirilmiş olup, 15-28 dakika arasında sürmüştür. Verilerin çözümünde nitel veri analizi yöntemlerinden betimsel analiz yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Yapılan analizler sonucunda mukbang videolarının oldukça ilgi gördüğü, birçok katılımcının bu videoları rutin bir şekilde izlediği ve hayatına adapte ettiği tespit edilmiştir. Dahası yayın esnasında tüketilen yiyecek miktarının fazlalığı, fenomenin karşısında yer alan yemeği bitirme hızı ya da kendi yemek kültürümüzde yer almayan yiyeceklerin tüketilmesi katılımcılarda şaşkınlık, hayret ve şoka girme gibi duygular uyandırmaktadır. Bulgular doğrultusunda ayrıca mukbang videolarının rutin yemek yeme alışkanlıkları üzerinde bir etkisi olduğu belirlenmiştir. Katılımcıların mukbang videolarını izledikleri esnada kendilerini tok hissetmelerine rağmen iştahlarının arttığı ve fast-food yeme veya restorana gitme eğilimlerinin oluştuğu sonucuna varılmıştır.
Research increasingly shows how speakers and learners of minority languages exploit online spaces to forge communication networks and create and consume content in languages that are otherwise marginalized from central societal domains. While the connectivity afforded by internet technologies is imperative to computer-mediated communication, culturally authentic content and expressions of identity are central to meaning-making processes that may influence online participation (or not) in a particular language. We examine participation in two Twitter campaigns for the Irish language—both conceived to increase the visibility of Irish online but with drastically different outcomes. Using the Twitter interface to conduct a content analysis of tweets bearing the respective campaign hashtags, we reveal the discretionary approach to online engagement exhibited by minority-language users and explicate some of the social and communicative practices that contributed to the success of one campaign over the other, bolstered by a comprehensive campaign infrastructure and semantically enticing features.
This thesis is concerned with the construal and the recontextualisation of primary social science knowledge in hypermedia texts. More specifically, it provides an account for the relations between verbiage and image in web-based multimodal interactive leaning materials, known as Multimodal Interactives (MIs). Based on the linguistic description, the thesis offers insights into the ways in which knowledge is construed and recontextaulised in the emerging electronic multimodal discourses.
The general theoretical orientation of this thesis is that of systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA). Within the framework of SF-MDA, the thesis proposes a complementary perspective on intersemiosis, which treats relations between verbiage and image as patterns formed during the unfolding of a text. To capture this type of intersemiotic relations, the thesis develops a logogenetic model for SF-MDA. The defining feature the model is the temporal axis (time), which serves as the main reference point for determining semiotic units (logogenetic units) and describing semiotic patterns (logogenetic patterns).
The logogenetic model is applied in studying five MIs. The basic logogenetic unit used in analysis is Critical Path, the shortest traversal through a MI. Two types of logogenetic patterns along the Critical Paths in the five MIs are examined in detail, including intersemiotic ideational coupling and clustering. There are five basic types of verbiage-imaged coupling emerged from the analysis, including Naming & Identifying, Representing, Classifying & Co-classifying, and Circumstantiating. The analysis of ideational clustering shows the different ways in which participants and activities form clusters in each MI.
By analysing intersemiotic coupling and clustering, the thesis shows that language and image construe the keys notions of primary social science such as people, place and community through three fundamental principles—abstraction, generalisation and specification. The study also demonstrates the possibility of achieving different degrees of pedagogic framing in hypermedia environments.
Focusing on the introductions to research articles in a variety of disciplines, the author uses appraisal theory to analyze how writers bring together multiple resources to develop their positions in the flow of discourse. It will be most useful for researchers new to appraisal, and to EAP teachers.
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
IntroductionDisciplining the Passions: Towards the Invention of the CriminalLombroso's CriticsCriminalistics, Rational Criminals, and Irrational MassesTechnologies and CrimeWomen and Crime; Race and CrimePopular and Literary Perspectives of CrimeConclusions
This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories.
