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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.

Similar to many sites on the Internet, interaction on YouTube often features confrontational, antagonistic exchanges among users. YouTube comments threads in particular are known for their offensive, conflagratory content. This books looks at this form of discourse. The term 'drama' (or 'flame wars') appears often as a label for a phenomenon that is easily recognisable. In these cases, serious disagreements can become entangled with interpersonal relationships and users take positions for themselves in relation to others and social controversies. The focus of this book is on the ways in which metaphor contributes to the development of Internet drama, particularly on YouTube. Although a growing body of research into YouTube social interaction continues to develop descriptions of user experience on YouTube, empirical studies of the YouTube video page are rare, as well as close discourse analysis of user interaction on the site. This research specifically focuses on the interaction of a group of users discussing issues of Christian theology and atheism on the site, analysing how discourse facilitates to antagonistic interaction among users. Since YouTube drama occurs publicly, the book focuses on actual YouTube video pages rather than user reports of their actions and responses. It investigates how and why YouTube drama develops through a systematic description and analysis of user discourse activity. Through close analysis of video pages, this study contributes to a greater academic understanding of Internet antagonism and YouTube interaction by revealing the factors which contribute to the development of drama over time.

CDS is a multifarious field constantly developing different methodological frameworks for analysing dynamically evolving aspects of language in a broad range of socio-political and institutional contexts. This volume is a cutting edge, interdisciplinary account of these theoretical and empirical developments. It presents an up-to-date survey of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), covering both the theoretical landscape and the analytical territories that it extends over. It is intended for critical scholars and students who wish to keep abreast of the current state of the art. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, the chapters are organised around different methodological perspectives for CDS (history, cognition, multimodality and corpora, among others). In the second part, the chapters are organised around particular discourse types and topics investigated in CDS, both traditionally (e.g. issues of racism and gender inequality) and only more recently (e.g. issues of health, public policy, and the environment).

Facebook, in just a few years, has become one of the central tools people use to communicate with each other in everyday life. However, the perceived freedom of action on the site and the actual processes that are permitted in Facebook's set up don't always match up: in this book this gap is examined. This book identifies the interrelations between user text actions and the software environment framing them. It takes a critical perspective on Facebook and develops a model that grants methodological access to complex interlaced practices incorporating media, text and literacies. It shows Facebook users employing idiosyncratic and Facebook-specific literacy practices, and gives weight to the larger hypothesis of the software service as an ideological setting designed to calculate and standardize human behaviour. Specifically, the book examines text action and automation within Facebook to determine how the software service intervenes in the communicative flow between/among profile owners and profile recipients. This is cutting edge work and of huge importance to modern fields of discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication.

Negotiating Spaces for Literacy Learning addresses two paradoxical currents that are sweeping through the contemporary educational field. The first is the opening up of possibilities for multimodal communication as a result of developments in digital technologies and the sensitivity to multiliteracies. The second is the increasing pressure from standardised testing, accountability and performance measurement which pull curricular and pedagogical practices out of alignment with the everyday informal practices and interests of teachers and learners and narrow opportunities for diverse expressions of literacy. Bringing together an international team of scholars to examine the tensions and struggles that result from the current educational climate, the book provides a much-needed discussion of the intersection of technologies of literacies, education and self. It does so through diverse approaches, including philosophical, theoretical and methodological treatments of multimodality and governmentality, and a range of literacies - early years, primary school, workplace, digital, middle school, secondary school, indigenous, adult and place. With examples taken from all stages of education and in several countries, the book allows readers to explore a range of multimodal practices and the ways in which governmentality plays out across them.