Experiencing Digital Discourses

“This unique volume invites us to explore not just how people communicate through digital media, but also how they experience it, and the real-world consequences of these experiences for our everyday activities, our social relationships, and our politics. It makes an important contribution to a new wave of scholarship in digital discourse that works at the nexus of the virtual and the material and takes seriously the potential for digital media to expand our possibilities for action (and activism) in the physical world.”

-Professor Rodney Jones, University of Reading, UK

This edited book addresses current trends in digital discourse analysis. The central theme of the volume is the notion of ‘digital experiences’; in other words, how users rely on mediating technologies both to communicate and bond with others, and to organize themselves for joint action. The chapters are grouped into three overarching themes: user engagement, multimodal communication, and online activism. Topics covered include memetic and multimodal humor on the internet, sticker use on WeChat, language ideology debates on YouTube, covert communication in QAnon forums, COVID narratives on Korean vlogs, and political activism on Twitter, among others. The book will be of interest to scholars in the broadly defined field of digital discourse analysis. It will be relevant to linguists, social media researchers, communication scholars, and media and cultural studies specialists.

Camilla Vásquez is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS) doctoral program at the University of South Florida, USA. She is author of The Discourse of Online Reviews (2014), Language, Creativity and Humour Online (2018) and the editor of Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis (2022).

Jan Chovanec is a Professor in English linguistics in the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He has done research on various forms of public media discourses with a recent focus on interactional and multimodal humour. He is author of The Discourse of Online Sportscasting (2018) and currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Discourse, Context & Media.