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UngerJ,WodakR,KhosraviNikM.CriticalDiscourseStudiesandSocialMediaData.In:David
Silverman,ed.QualitativeResearch(4thedition).London:SAGE,2016.
Preproofscopy
Criticaldiscoursestudiesandsocialmedia
data1
Johann W. Ungera, Ruth Wodakab and Majid KhosraviNikc
a. Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University
b. Institut fr Sprachwissenschaft, Universitt Wien
c. Media and Cultural Studies, Newcastle University
Abstract
This chapter outlines key theoretical and methodological aspects of critical discourse
studies (CDS) and suggests how they may be applied to social media data. After a brief
overview of the main features of CDS, there is a discussion of what makes data in
digitally mediated contexts different and interesting for researchers who adopt a critical
perspective to social phenomena. Eight methodological steps from one approach to CDS,
the discoursehistorical approach, are presented with specific reference to how they can
be applied to social media data. In the final part of the chapter, a case study showing
how a Facebook focus group was set up to study political resistance is used by way of
illustration.
Keywords
Social media, critical discourse studies, digital discourse, context, argumentation, focus
groups, Facebook, genre, discoursehistorical approach
1Sections
produce and reproduce unequal power relations between (for instance) social classes,
genders, and ethnic/cultural majorities and minorities through the ways in which they
represent things and position people (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997). As a broad
research programme, most critical studies of discourse are based on the analysis of a
topicrelated body of linguistic data positioned and explained in relation to a socio
political context with a critical angle. Within this broad framework, texts are analysed
against genrespecific (institutional, media) backgrounds to address the processes of
distribution. This includes providing some background to the nature of the data, the
range and quality of the audience, the possibilities provided by the genre of
communication, and the semiotic features of the language used (see e.g., Wodak 2011,
2014 on the fourlevel context model of the discoursehistorical approach; and
KhosraviNik 2010 on the interaction of context levels).
to reveal multiple interests and contradictions among the text producers, based on the
evidence of the text and its contexts. The final one, prospective critique, builds on these
two levels in order to identify areas of social concern that can be taken up with
practitioners and wider audiences (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 34). Naming oneself
critical thus implies explicit ethical standards: an intention to make the researchers
position, interests, and values explicit and their criteria as transparent as possible,
without feeling the need to apologize for the critical stance of their work (van Leeuwen
2006: 293; Wodak and Meyer 2015; Angermuller et al. 2014; Wodak 2013).
Although the core definition of ideology as a coherent and relatively stable set of beliefs or
values has remained the same in political science over time, the connotations associated
with this concept have undergone many transformations. Clearly it is not easy to capture
ideology as a belief system and simultaneously to free the concept from negative
connotations (Knight 2006: 625). It is the functioning of ideologies in everyday life that
intrigues CDS researchers. Moreover, we have to distinguish between ideology (or other
frequently used terms such as stance/ beliefs/ opinions/Weltanschauung/positioning)
and discourse (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 474ff).
Quite rightly, Purvis and Hunt state that these concepts do not stand alone but are
associated not only with other concepts but with different theoretical traditions. Thus,
ideology is usually (more or less) closely associated with the Marxist tradition, whereas
discourse has gained much significance in the linguistic turn in modern social theory
by providing a term with which to grasp the way in which language and other forms of
social semiotics not merely convey social experience but play some major part in
constituting social objects (the subjectivities and their associated identities), their
relations, and the field in which they exist' (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 474).
Power is the third concept which is central for CDS: CDS researchers are interested in
the way discourse produces and reproduces social domination, that is, power abuse of
one group over others, and how dominated groups may discursively resist such abuse.
This raises the question of how CDS researchers define power and what moral standards
allow them to differentiate between power use and abuse a question which has so far
had to remain unanswered (Billig, 2008). Holzscheiter (2005) points out that much CDS
research is concerned with differentiating the modes of exercising power in discourse
and over discourse in the field of politics Power in discourse here means actors struggles
over different interpretations of meaning. This struggle for power in discursive
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interaction relates to the selection of specific linguistic codes, rules for interaction,
rules for access to the meaningmaking forum, rules for decisionmaking, turntaking,
opening of sessions, making contributions and interventions. (ibid, 69) Power over
discourse is defined as processes of inclusion and exclusion (Wodak 2007, 2009a, b).
Finally, power of discourse relates to the influence of historically grown macro
structures of meaning, of the conventions of the language game in which actors find
themselves (Holzscheiter 2005: 61). In texts, discursive differences are negotiated; they
are governed by differences in power that is in part encoded in, and determined by,
discourse and by genre. Therefore texts are often sites of struggle in that they show
traces of differing discourses and ideologies contending for dominance.
generated texts, such as comment threads on newspaper sites or under Facebook posts.
For a CDS study involving social media data, these institutional texts should be viewed
and analysed within their new interactive context, while bearing in mind that the social
nature of communication is the core quality of textual practice in the participatory web.
While distinctions between usergenerated content and official content are still
discernible, there is a general ethos of crowdsourcing in terms of what can become
more important or attract attention, and in this sense usergenerated content and formal
texts compete with each other.
In addition to positioning social media within broader sociopolitical and media
contexts, we follow Herring (e.g. 2007) in suggesting that paying attention to specific
aspects of the medium and situation allows us to classify socialmedia data more
effectively, and thus conduct a more nuanced analysis. The table below (Table 1) shows
some of the factors that can be considered in linguistic and semiotic analyses of social
media data in general, and some of these are then taken up in our case study to illustrate
how they can be integrated into a CDS approach:
Table 1 Medium and Situation Factors (from Herring 2007, quoted in Page et al.
2014)
Medium factors
Synchronicity
Asychronoussynchronous
Message transmission
Ephemeral archived
Channels of communication
Privacy settings
Anonymous
Message format
Situation factors
Participation structure
Participant characteristics
Purpose
Topic
Subject matter
Tone
Formal or informal
Norms
Code
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a detailed list of linguistic and semiotic
phenomena that a CDS researcher who is interested in social media might analyse, but
many of the classic analytical categories used in various approaches to CDS (see Wodak
and Meyer 2015), such as modality, presupposition, syntax, nominalisation or
metaphors, often still can be relevant, and can be combined with the factors listed by
Herring (see above). It is important to note that the choice of which categories to analyse
is highly context and genredependent. Herring (2013) distinguishes between different
kinds of genres in the participatory web: familiar (e.g. email or textbased chat),
reconfigured (e.g. review websites, which now tend to include primarily usergenerated
rather than expertgenerated content) and emergent (e.g. microblogs like Twitter). It is
important to keep these genre differences in mind when establishing analytical
categories, as phenomena that are highly salient in one genre (for instance, jokes and
irony used in a formal speech by a politician) may be less so in socialmedia contexts, or
vice versa.
10
studies and various other socially-engaged disciplines have been trying to unpack the role that
social media have played in these contexts.
Much of the media coverage of the Arab Spring and other protest movements such as Occupy
has involved photographs and videos of events happening in public spaces in large cities,
many of them provided by protestors using their own cameras or smartphones. But even for
people not holding a device in their hands while on Tahrir Square or on the steps of the
London Stock Exchange, their physical realities will have been mediated in some way by
social media. Tufekci & Wilson (2012) maintain that Social media alter the key tenets of
collective action [] and, in doing so, create new vulnerabilities for even the most durable of
authoritarian regimes. Their overall finding is that social media accelerated, but were of
course not wholly responsible for, those vulnerabilities (as some mainstream Western media
would have had us believe at the time). The changes in key tenants of collective action could
be seen in the content, form, distribution, and consumption of images. For example, the image
below (Fig. X.2) is of signs laid out in Tahrir Square protesting against the Egyptian
President, Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in 2011 after massive protests across Egypt, and
particularly in Tahrir Square in one of the key events of the Arab Spring. These signs will
have been seen by thousands of people in their physical location but they may also have been
seen by thousands if not hundreds of thousands more people as images circulated on the web,
via social media and on websites associated with more traditional news media. While the
analysis of the image itself (the various texts, languages and linguistic varieties used, the
arrangement of semiotic elements, for instance drawing on Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006 and
their grammar of visual semiosis) is an important theme for CDS, in this example we are
focusing on the bigger picture: the relation of images such as these to broader media ecologies
and global socio-political changes. The image appears on the first results page of a Google
image search for Tahrir Square signs (see below), suggesting Googles algorithms rate it
highly. This may be because it is widely linked to, because it is frequently clicked on, or for
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various other reasons that Google algorithms have decided indicate an image is worthy of
attention. The metadata available with the image also give some clues. At the time of writing,
it has been viewed approximately 2,500 times on its source page, Al Jazeeras English Flickr
page, which is not a huge number, but in addition to being on Flickr, it is also visible on the
Wikimedia Foundation page from which it was retrieved for this article. While there are
currently no Wikipedia pages linking to it, a Google image-match search shows that this
version of the photo has been used on a number of online news sites (see
http://tinyurl.com/tahrirsquaresigns). The Flickr page also gives a considerable amount of
information about the image, for instance that it was taken on a particular type of camera (an
entry-level single-lens reflex camera) that might be used by a keen hobby photographer or
perhaps a freelance journalist, rather than a mobile device or a professional-level camera.
However, the fact that the image is found on Al Jazeeras official Flickr page suggests that it
was taken either by a journalist associated with the media corporation, or that they bought the
image from someone who was not previously affiliated. All this is valuable information for an
analysis of the media/institutional context, and it gives us some clues as to the production and
consumption of this digitally mediated image, though it does not of course give all the
information that we might wish for as CDS analysts, or that might be revealed through further
ethnographic work or contact with the image producer(s) (as advocated by Androutsopoulos,
see above).
There is of course value in doing ethnographic work in the physical spaces where events
related to a protest are taking place. Indeed, to learn more about linguistic and political
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behaviours, and depending on the scholarly traditions we draw on, this kind of work may be
essential. Through on-the-ground ethnographic work we can get access to local (or glocal?)
representations (or sometimes misrepresentations?) of global movements, but to grasp fully
how global media (mis)represent local voices, we of course need to include texts drawn from
these media in our analysis.
Moreover, many of these movements are not about global problems but about local (or at least
national) ones, or local manifestations of global problems. Many of the most powerful actions
and images from various protests since 2011 have been oriented towards achieving local
objectives though they have then been photographed, videoed, described in blogs, put on
Twitter and then reproduced and recontextualised globally. What many activists have been
successful in doing is using intertextual references to highlight the links and similarities
between different movements where these exist and in using previous successes (e.g.
Tunisia) to present visual and verbal arguments pertaining to their present plight. Thus, we
would argue that many of these movements are at best quasi-global. We might ask why these
local protests with their quasi-global orientations happen in particular places and at particular
times. We draw on the notion of political opportunity structures that Kitschelt (1986: 58) finds
are comprised of specific configurations of resources, institutional arrangements and
historical precedents for social mobilization, which facilitate the development of protest
movements in some instances and constrain them in others. This notion seems highly
compatible with the context-sensitive analysis of institutions as well as accounting for sociopolitical contexts of communication supported by most critical discourse scholars (Figure
X.1). In the present case, the conditions that led to the Arab Spring long preceded the advent
of social media: repressive political or military regimes, restrictions on free communication,
poverty and violence, heavy-handed policing and many other factors contributed. However, as
Tufekci and Wilson (2012) argue, the advent of social media helped to facilitate and
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accelerate different kinds of communication and we argue that SNS should thus be regarded
as one element of the political opportunity structures.
As aforementioned, in this example, we are particularly interested in specific technologies of
protest. These are not just technologies in the sense of gadgets running on electricity. Rather,
any deliberate act of semiosis makes use of a technology-or rather strategies, even if it is the
human voice. The argument is that protestors in any context will make use of the technologies
that are available to them, and they will utilize these to the maximum extent possible within
their affordances. One technology we were particularly struck by was the use of banners,
posters or placards often handwritten or hand-painted and the subsequent appearance of
these signs in images shared via social media. The use of signs of this kind is of course not
new, and their appearance in mainstream press photographs has a similarly long pedigree.
What is relatively new, however, is the speed at which images of these signs can be spread to
viewers not physically co-present and shared and recontextualised on various social media
platforms. This thus provides us with a compelling reason for studying digitally mediated
texts in this context: the strategic (and perhaps sometimes accidental) distribution of specific
images from a physical protest location via social and traditional media has become a vital
link within and between social movements. However, at the same time that protesters are
trying to get their message out, garner more support, seek help from abroad etc., they are
working unpaid for social media corporations and generating advertising revenue.
The strong intertextual and interdiscursive links between signs in various contexts also
warranted further examination. For instance, one image of a handheld sign in Tahrir Square,
photographed in February 2011, bears the slogan Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers; One
World, One Pain, thus expressing support for workers in the US State of Wisconsin, who
were at the time protesting against proposed laws attacking their employment rights and
pensions (see http://crooksandliars.com/scarce/sign-tahrir-square). The full extent of this
intertextuality becomes apparent when digitally mediated texts are brought into the physical
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environment of a protest, e.g. a poster showing a Facebook Like icon or Twitter hashtag,
which is then remediated by being photographed and posted and shared via social media.
Furthermore, various ways of challenging dominant ideologies, e.g. drawing on anticapitalism or calls for political freedom, as well as connections between events, e.g.
references to the Tunisian revolution in the Egyptian uprising, are intertextual bridges
between different, but related, more-or-less mediated contexts.
We might ask whether it is the emergence of digital and social media that has made these
sorts of strong intertextual links between different protest movements possible in the first
place. This is not to suggest that the technologies literally cause the protests, but it is evident
that they form part of the political opportunity structures. However, new structures around
protests, such as flat hierarchies, shared decision-making and the absence of leaders that have
characterised movements like Occupy, may have been made possible by changes in
communication structures; in other words, they may have fundamentally changed the
relationships between affected individuals and groups, as predicted by Graham (2006, see
above). This is supported by Gonzlez-Bailn et al.s (2011: 5-6) analysis of the use of
Twitter in the Spanish May protests. They found that communication via Twitter involves a:
trade-off between global bridges (controlled by well connected users) and
local networks: the former are efficient at transmitting information, the later at
transmitting behavior. This is one reason why Twitter has played a prominent
role in so many recent protests and mobilizations: it combines the global reach
of broadcasters with local, personalized relations.
Our key finding, however, is that the relationships between protest movements across the
globe are not unlike those between linguistic communities, whereby global languages
(particularly English) often dominate. Furthermore, the hegemonic power structures found in
the global economic system are partially reproduced in the way technologies and texts flow
between protests, much as in the case of academic publishing, where Western publications
15
in the English language are seen as more prestigious and desirable in many disciplines (see for
instance Merilinen, Tienari, Thomas and Davies 2008). We make these claims for two
reasons: First, while some research points to the many multilingual and intertextual signs
found in Tahrir Square (e.g. Aboelezz 2014), we have found very little evidence that the
protests around Occupy Wall Street or in London were similarly multilingual. They were
strongly intertextual but what was notably absent from these contexts was much
engagement with other global-resistance movements. This is easily supported by systematic
content and structural analysis of the most popular image search results for Tahrir square
signs vs Occupy Wall Street signs, just a few of which are depicted in Figures X.3 and X.4,
below, and image blogs such as wearethe99percent on tumblr. Again, the details of the
analysis go beyond the scope of this case study, but these involved categorising each image
according to which language(s) and language variety(ies) were used in the signs, and specific
categories that arose from the data themselves related to the messages on the signs (e.g.
regime-critical, ironic, intertextual references etc.).
The disparity in languages used and between references to and from each protest location may
of course be just because the pictures and descriptions of the protests that we saw during our
period of data collection were already mediated by news organisations, bloggers and tweeters,
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which/who will naturally focus on data that are globally accessible, i.e. in English, if we are
talking about Western reporting. But as suggested earlier on, it is mainly these globallyaccessible images and reports that have the potential to forge links between protest
movements. Iconic images emerge, and by being shared and linked to repeatedly, they
become more prominent in search results, which then makes them more likely to be reused. It
is the most popular images the ones linked to, reproduced, recontextualised that constitute
the global discourse on the protest movements. Thus, we argue that these are an appropriate
site for research in themselves and carry the same, if not higher, levels of authenticity as
data sources when considering global flows of media production, consumption and
prosumption. There are of course references to the Arab Spring by the protestors in Occupy
protests and even in interviews conducted with UK rioters. In fact, Tahrir was central to the
formation of Occupy, if we take the Adbusters call to occupy Wall Street as the starting
point: Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On 17 September, flood into lower Manhattan, set
up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street, we found, however, that in
the signs and texts produced by the occupiers, these references were mainly instrumentalised
in two ways: First, in arguments about the right to protest, and in attempts to highlight the
hypocrisy of governments that support protests abroad while suppressing them at home; and
second, as a symbolic claim about of the global nature of the movement. However, they did
not necessarily indicate any direct engagement with or links between these protestors and
those in other global resistance movements.
The second reason for our claims about global hegemonic flows is that it is significant that
much of the infrastructure for the social media platforms and digital devices used to augment
the physical protests is based in the United States or other Western countries, and most of
this infrastructure is run by companies that are owned by shareholders who are expecting a
return on their investment. This feeds to the narratives of the protests presented in the
Western media, particularly with the labels Twitter revolution or Facebook revolution.
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While the mainstream English-language media have often presented a compelling narrative of
liberation, democratization and social change caused by Western technology, the reality is
of course often much more complex.
With regard to linguistic practices, we see particularly notable changes in the channels and
modes of communication, rather than in the linguistic forms being used. These are not,
however, restricted to social struggles but are common to many forms of digital
communication in the public sphere. Social and digital media have undoubtedly played a role
in organizing these protests, in making the views of protestors public and in holding public
figures to account (as suggested by Tufekci and Wilson 2012). Their particular value to
protesters has been in drawing global attention to local issues and in circumventing traditional
media outlets that are restricted by state control or commercial interests. Nevertheless, they
are themselves also susceptible to state or commercial control, and thus we should not be too
utopian about their role. With regard to multilingualism, the picture is complex: much as in
international business and politics, English occupies a hegemonic position in the global
communication of issues being protested about. Multilingualism appears at times to be
symbolic and to be heavily instrumentalised, or even commodified, as part of local protest
goals.
Future prospects
CDS is constantly developing to take account of new theoretical and methodological
developments, and being adapted to new sites and contexts of research. In one sense,
social media is just another such set of sites/contexts. However, given the sweeping
changes to communication practices across the world, particularly in more affluent
countries, that have accompanied the growth of digital communication technologies, we
feel that it is necessary for CDS to take account of not only the affordances of these
technologies. This applies to how discourse is organised, shaped and disseminated e.g.
through automated algorithms, manipulation of news feeds and the interconnectedness
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of various platforms, but also the specific methods that can be used to study data, e.g. in
accounting for new forms of communication such as intext annotation, tagging, likes,
and sharing. It also applies to the growing body of theoretical work on social media, for
example explaining new forms of media power, that will provide new concepts and
frameworks to integrate into CDS.
Summary
In this chapter we have presented some relevant considerations when applying critical
discourse studies to social media data. We have outlined some of the key theoretical and
analytical categories from traditional applications of CDS and discussed some additional
ones that are useful in digitally mediated contexts. Eight methodological steps from the
methodology of the discoursehistorical approach are described in terms of how they
can be applied to social media, and finally we demonstrate the application of some of
these concepts and methods in a specific case study.
Useful websites
http://www.discourseanalysis.net/ Research portal for discourse studies
http://cadaad.net/ Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines
website, open access journal, conference announcements and other useful content
http://snurb.info/ Website of Axel Bruns on participatory media, citizen journalism
and useful research methods and tools for large volumes of digital data
http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/ New Media, New Social Science blog
Suggested Reading
For an accessible introduction to linguistic research into social media, including a
chapter on ethics, one on qualitative research, and two on ethnographic research, see
Page et al. (2014). Fuchs (2014) gives a useful and thoughtprovoking introduction to
social media from a critical (Marxist) perspective. KhosraviNik and Unger (2015), in
Wodak and Meyers new edition of Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (2015),
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