Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse

by Michele Zappavigna

Overview

Metadata such as the hashtag is an important dimension of social media communication. Despite its important role in practices such as curating, tagging, and searching content, there has been little research into how meanings are made with social metadata. This book considers how hashtags have expanded their reach from an information-locating resource to an interpersonal resource for coordinating social relationships and expressing solidarity, affinity, and affiliation. It adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate the communicative functions of hashtags in relation to both language and images.

This book is a follow up to Zappavigna's 2012 model of ambient affiliation, providing an extended analytical framework for exploring how affiliation occurs, bond by bond, in online discourse. It focuses in particular on the communing function of hashtags in metacommentary and ridicule, using recent Twitter discourse about US President Donald Trump as a case study. It is essential reading for researchers as well as undergraduates studying social media on any academic course.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474292375
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/17/2018
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.13(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Michele Zappavigna is a lecturer at the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Hashtags as a semiotic technology
3. The ideational and interpersonal functions of hashtags
4. #WhinyLittleBitch: Evaluative metacommentary
5. #SpicerFacts: The quoted voice and intersubjectivity
6. #YouAreFakeNews: Construing values
7. Ambient affiliation: Sharing social bonds by negotiating and communing around couplings
8. #AlternativeFacts: Censuring and mocking the quoted voice
9. #TinyTrump: Intermodal coupling and visual hashtag memes
10. Conclusion
Cast of characters
Hashtag glossary
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This work fits in nicely with recent studies of language on-line, digital literacy, language use in social media, and digital discourse. The book presents an excellent case for using the Appraisal Framework to analyze interaction in social media ... I see a lot of potential for future research analyzing hashtags used on and off line, in fact reading this book has led me to conduct some of my own research on hashtags. Zappavigna’s discussion of hashtags as a form of meta-discourse that goes beyond known meanings of metadiscourse, I found particularly inspiring." - LINGUIST List

From the Publisher