Discourse of Twitter and Social Media : How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web

This title offers examination of the effects of social media innovations on electronically mediated discourse, focusing on interaction. Social media such as microblogging services and social network sites are changing the way people interact online and search for information and opinions. This book investigates linguistic patterns in electronic discourse, looking at online evaluative language, internet slang, memes and ambient affiliation using a large Twitter corpus (over 100 million tweets) alongside specialized case studies. The author argues that we are currently witnessing a cultural movement from online conversation to what can be termed 'searchable talk' - online talk where people affiliate by making their discourse findable (for example, via metadata such as Twitter hashtags) by others holding similar interests. This cutting edge text will be of interest to all scholars and students dealing with electronically mediated discourse. Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways language mediates and shapes our interactions with each other and with the social, political and cultural formations of our society.

The Continuum Discourse Series aims to capture the fast-developing interest in discourse to provide students, new and experienced teachers and researchers in applied linguistics, ELT and English language with an essential bookshelf. Each book deals with a core topic in discourse studies to give an in-depth, structured and readable introduction to an aspect of the way language is used in real life.

Featured in the April 2012 ESOL Communicator newsletter.
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