Can you keep up with the Kardashians? How to analyse social media language

In the previous blog, we looked we looked at Classkick — an online feedback tool. This time we will examine how social media can be used in education. This is the first of several pieces on how social media can be used as a learning tool

Can you keep up?

Social Media Literacies and Learning

Before delving deeply into social media communication, you may want to break it down into something that you can get your teeth into. Here are some areas that you could explore:

• What are the emerging literacies and conventions of social media communication?
• What are the grammatical, syntactical, visual, symbolic and technical conventions?
• Which structures and conventions are more likely to create engagement and influence?
• How can a selection of case studies create a lens through which these can be interrogated?
• When Facebook launched in 2004, it would require a new vocabulary and set of behaviours. What are these and how are they changing? How do they differ from other social platforms?

Analysing social media language

The AQA A level English Language module on 21st Century Language asks students to do the following:

• Analyse using a wide range of terminology
• Understand concepts (eg medium, genre) and issues (ideology, attitude)
• Evaluate the broader context

What this means in simple terms is:

• Use the right terminology (eg lexis, noun phrase etc)
• Discuss who is saying what, how and for what purpose
• Evaluate what has caused language like this to be used

But what is the right terminology in this instance? On a basic level, it is:

• Adjectives
• Nouns
• Verbs

On a more advanced level, it is:

• Connotations
• Conventions
• Dialect and sociolect
• Emotive language
• Lexis: formal? Informal? Field specific?
• Noun phrase
• Pre-modifiers
• Rhetorical language, juxtaposition and irony
• Typography

Analysing Snapchat

• If you are still struggling to make sense of Facebook’s linguistic conventions and expected behaviours, what about Snapchat?

In many ways, it could be argued that the grammatical, syntactical and lexical conventions of the Daily Mail on Snapchat are very similar to both the paper version and Mail Online.

This section will give you some ideas of how to analyse The Mail — or any other mainstream publication — on Snapchat.

StarryiD social media coaching & web

The Discover platform and naming

What is language anyway?

• A semiotic system (Page, 2014)
• Texts begin as abstract (e.g the letter Q) but takes on meaning from structure and context.
• Other non-verbal aspects also communicate meaning: fonts, images, gestures.

Why are social media so hard to analyse?

• It is multimodal (words+images+video etc)
• It can be encrypted (e.g Whatsapp)
• Ethics (e.g will Twitter surrender sensitive data, what data do FB have about us?)
• Researching social media: is a linguistic activity (Jones, 2012: 30) –Search terms need correct syntax, meaning; can be descriptive, creative or related.
• It exists within a wider semiotic system of image, sound, emoji, kinetic systems (Page, 2014).

But….

• Are new multimedia (image and video-based) behaviours a distraction from

debates about literacy or are they part of literacy itself?

So, let’s put all this into perspective

The resistance stance

• Print literacies are more important
• New literacies interfere and de-skill

Leander, D, 2009: 247–249

The ‘replacement’ stance

• Challenges the ‘resistance’ stance
• Teaching of literacy is outdated and irrelevant
• Images, film and online content should now be analysed (not novels and poems).

The ‘return’ stance

• New literacies should be encouraged but only to help people with old literacies.
• E.g, analysing film helps us understand novels.

Conventions of Social Media Language

• Metadata
• Tagging: produces overlapping (not rigid) associations (like the brain does).
• Folksonomies not taxonomies
• Categories are invented by the people who use them.
• Bottom up, not top-down.
• Levy (1997, cited in Jones, 2012) calls this ‘collective intelligence’).

Who consumes social media the most?

• ‘Digital natives’ not ‘digital immigrants’(Prensky, 2001)?
• ‘Digital residents’ or ‘digital visitors’ (White and LeCornu, 2011, cited in Page, 2014)

References

• Jones, R. 2012. Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction. 1st Edition. London: Routledge
• Leander, D, 2009. cited in Carrington and Robinson (ed). Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom Practices. London: Sage
• Page, R. 2014. Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide. Student Edition. London: Routledge.