The chapter ends with a detailed analysis of the above-mentioned tweet. The chapter focuses then on Lemke’s concept of hypermodality, that features the integration of Hallidayan approach to language with multimodality and computer mediated communication. The first part of the chapter introduces the Hallidayan social semiotic approach to language studies and the three metafunctions he theorized. The third and last chapter is dedicated to analysis of Alyssa Milano’s tweet, from a digital, discursive and multimodal point of view. In this specific case, social media, especially Twitter’s services and its social practices such as the “hashtag”, the and the practice of “retweeting”, have shown their effectiveness in gathering activists with similar goals and create awareness about the movement. However, the main focus of this second chapter is on the rise of the #MeToo Movement, which although it was first created in 2006, gained attention only in October 2017 after actress Alyssa Milano’s tweet. The study goes then on by presenting the case of the 2013 hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which represents an example of the power of social media in gathering people. The second chapter focuses on civic engagement and political participation on SNSs and opens with a 2009 Facebook’s study that shows the contribution of the Web in the empowerment of citizenship and activism. It also takes into examination the study on social networking sites carried out by dana boyd and Nicole Ellison in order to focus the attention on the process of collaboration and ‘peer production’ facilitated by social media. This research draws upon the principles of social semiotics theorized by the linguist Michael Halliday and the further studies on multimodality developed by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on the study of digital media in the field of discourse analysis, highlighting the new affordances of the ‘read-write web’ and the birth of new literacy practices along with the rise of social networking sites (SNSs) and social media platforms, with particular regard to Twitter and its main characteristics. Considering the globalized and digitally networked scenario people are living in today, the aim of this work is to study the influence of digital media, in particular social media and social networking sites like Twitter, in the process of meaning-making and the creation of civic engagement and political participation. Indeed, digital media has enhanced the number of communicative modes available to us at any given time. The development of new forms of media, which facilitate the mixing of different communicative modes in new ways over time and space, has changed the whole idea of what is meant by a text or a conversation.
The creation of new technological tools and the introduction of new communicative practices that digital media brought along with them, like “tagging”, “blogging”, “hyperlinking”, “filtering” and many others, increased people’s opportunity to create and channelling information. With the advent of Web 2.0 and the emergence of digital media, the way in which people communicate has changed considerably.
0 kommentar(er)
