Discourse analysis of new media data

The last two chapters have shown the utility of discourse analysis beyond the speech event for ethnographic and archival research, and they have illustrated how to apply our methodological approach to different kinds of data. Ethnographic research typically collects and analyzes discourse data from living research participants over shorter timescales and more limited spatial scales. Archival research typically collects and analyzes discourse data from historical artifacts that cover broader temporal and spatial scales. Our approach allows discourse analysts to document pathways of linked events and the social actions accomplished across events using either kind of data, although some details of the approach differ in the two types of cases.

In this chapter and the next, we show how to apply our approach to a third and final kind of data, from “new media.” New media technologies include various social media, from more traditional forms like email and blogs to newer forms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, with new platforms being developed constantly. These sites of communication have been made possible by the internet and have more recently been transformed by the affordances of mobile devices. New media communication is usually densely networked, often with many recipients receiving messages and with linkages to other posts through forwarding and quoting. Websites or applications serve as hubs that connect virtual communities and networks. New media communication happens closer to real time than traditional mediated communication, with responses expected more quickly and topics changing rapidly. People use new media to share information via text, image, and video, and messages are often multimodal.

As with ethnographic and archival data, studies of “new media” represent an ideal type. Archival data is often incorporated into ethnographic research, and vice versa. Similarly, studies of new media often involve ethnographicand/or archival components. The logs of past communications that serve as the data source for new media studies are like archives in many ways, making new media studies an important type of archival work in the internet era. New media studies sometimes also include archives of traditional media, which are often explicitly or implicitly presupposed in internet-mediated communication. Some studies include all three data types, if the research questions demand it and available data allow it. We have seen in the previous chapter how Robert Moore’s work on Irish English accent combines analyses of archival data from 19th- and 20th-century books with analyses of new media posts from a 21st-century website. With this hybrid data set, Moore was able to show how the stereotyping of Irish speakers persists not only across historical time but also across types of media.

In this chapter and the next, we show how our approach to discourse analysis beyond the speech event can help document pathways across events of new media communication. This chapter applies our model to studies of new media by Elaine Chun (2013) and Betsy Rymes (2014). We first consider Chun’s study of a YouTube video and comments posted in response to it. She traces pathways of internet commentary, showing how links across posts establish social action. Her work illustrates how the meaning of verbal and nonverbal communication is often not located in the original event itself (in this case, the video) but, instead, is shaped by how that event is taken up in subsequent linked events (in this case, the comments). Rymes traces the recontextualization of stock storyline elements in music videos, following them across events as others remix them. Even though the same formula is repeated across events of video storytelling, Rymes shows that the elements are recombined in ways that accomplish different kinds of positioning and social action.