This lively and accessible study of media and discourse combines theoretical reflection with empirical engagement, and brings together insights from a range of disciplines. Within media and cultural studies, the study of media texts is dominated by an exclusive focus on representation. This book adds long overdue attention to social interaction. The book is divided into two sections. The first outlines key theoretical issues and concepts, including informalisation, genre hybridisation, positioning, dialogism and discourse. The second is a sustained interrogation of social interaction in and around media. Re-examining issues of representation and interaction, it critically assesses work on the para-social and broadcast sociability, then explores distinct sites of interaction: production communities, audience communities and 'interactivity' with audiences.

Some of the most important questions regarding the relationship between media and culture are about communication. How are the meanings which make up a culture shared in society? How is power performed in the media? What identities and relationships take shape there? Media Discourses introduces readers to discourse analysis to show how media communication works. Written in a lively style and drawing on examples from contemporary media, it discusses what precisely gets represented in mediatexts, who gets to do the talking, what knowledge people need toshare in order to understand the media and how power relations are reinforced or challenged. Each chapter discusses a particular media genre, including news, advertising, reality television and weblogs. At the same time, each chapter also introduces a range of approaches to media discourse, from analysis of linguistic details to the rules of conversation and the discursive construction of selfhood. A glossary explains key terms and suggestions for further reading are given at the end of each chapter. This is a key text for media studies, mass communication, communication studies, linguistics and journalism studies students.

Featuring a wide range of exercises, examples, and images, this textbook provides a practical way of analyzing the discourses of the global media industries. Building on a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of global media communication, specific case studies of lifestyle and entertainment media are explored with examples from films, global women's magazines, Vietnamese news reporting and computer war games. Finally, this book investigates how global media communication is produced, looking at the formats, languages and images used in creating media materials, both globally and in localized forms. At a time when the media is becoming increasingly global, often with the same films, news and television programmes shown all over the world; Global Media Discourse provides an accessible, lively introduction into how globalization is changing the language and communicative practices of the media. Integrating a range of approaches, including political economy, discourse analysis and ethnography, this book will be of particular interest to students of media and communication studies, applied linguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis.

The study of language ideologies has become a key theme in sociolinguistics over the past decade. It is the study of the relationship between representations of language, on the one hand, and broader aesthetic, economic, moral and political concerns, on the other. Research into the particular role played by media discourse in the construction, reproduction and contestation of such ideologies has been widely scattered - this book brings together this emerging field. It considers how, in an era of global communication technologies, the media - by which we understand the press, radio, television, cinema, the internet and multimodal gaming - help to disseminate preferred uses of, and ideas about, language. The book is tightly focussed on the relationship between language ideologies and media discourse, together with the methods and techniques required for the analysis of that relationship. It also places emphasis on television and new-media texts, incorporating and expanding upon recent theoretical insights into visual communication and multimodal discourse analysis. International in scope, this book will also be of interest to students from a wide range of fields including linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), modern languages, education, media studies, communication studies and cultural theory.

In spite of the growing literature on discourse analysis, the relationship of discourse to violent/non-violent outcomes of conflict is an under-researched area. This book combines theories on ethnic conflict, identity construction and discourse analysis with a comprehensive and inclusive survey of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It presents an understanding of the interrelationship between 'words' and 'deeds' grounded through an extensively close analysis of film, television and newspapers samples taken from the period. This combination of ground-breaking applications of theory with detailed empirical case studies will make Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts of key interest to scholars across a range of social sciences including sociology, discourse analysis, media, conflict and peace studies as well as those concerned with ethnopolitical conflict.

This volume serves as an in-depth investigation of the diversity of means and practices that constitute (dis)identification and identity construction in social media. Given the increasing prevalence of social media in everyday life and the subsequent growing diversity in the types of participants and forms of participation, the book makes the case for a rigorous analysis of social media discourses and digital literacy practices to demonstrate the range of semiotic resources used in online communication that form the foundation of (dis)identification processes. Divided into two major sections, delineating between the (dis)identification of the self across various social categories and the (dis)identification of the self in relation to the "other", the book employs a discourse-ethnographic approach to highlight the value of this type of theoretical framework in providing nuanced descriptions of identity construction in social media and illuminating their larger, long-term societal and cultural implications. This volume is a key resource for researchers, and students in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, computer-mediated communication, and cultural studies.

Iranian Feminism and Transnational Ethics in Media Discourse examines the mediated dialogue of #WhiteWednesdays, specifically between U.S. mainstream news narratives and Iranian activists on Twitter. These narratives highlight how hierarchies of visibility in both news and social media discourse overshadow transnational feminist politics while reinforcing femonationalist narratives. Such discourses seemingly support women in Iran, but simultaneously promote Islamophobic messages aligned with U.S. geopolitical politics. In a critical discourse analysis of the #WhiteWednesdays campaign on Twitter and mainstream U.S. news coverage of the movement, this analysis complicates representations of Iran, Muslim women, and feminist politics. The author also unpacks the politics of representation, where voices on the ground are obscured in favor of elite sources who reaffirm U.S Islamophobic and xenophobic ideologies. Scholars and students of communication and media studies will find this book particularly interesting.

This book explores representations of social media in European media discourses across different socio-historical contexts, demonstrating how such analysis can illuminate the tension between global and local in media discourses in today’s globalised world. The volume draws on data from a trilingual corpus from different editions of the free daily Metro from Finland, France, and Greece spanning a five-year period, with a focus on Facebook and Twitter. Adopting a French discourse analysis approach, which takes as its point of departure the notion of “discourse as the social practice of representing”, the book integrates qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate the social and political role depictions of social media play in specific socio-historical contexts. This approach brings to the fore both commonalities and differences in the popularity of specific platforms and coverage of specific news topics and hot-button issues. In so doing, the volume elucidates the ways in which global practices become integrated and immersed into local contexts, offering avenues for future research on social media in news discourses. This book will be of interest to scholars in applied linguistics, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, media studies, and cultural studies.

This new study reconciles cognitive metaphor theory with Critical Discourse Analysis to offer a fresh approach to the study of metaphor. In applying this framework to a substantial corpus of texts from business magazines, the author shows how metaphors of war, sports and evolutionary struggle are used to construct business as a masculinized social domain. In view of the subtle but pervasive socio-cognitive impact of these metaphors, the study raises the question of possible alternatives and the scope for change in business media discourse.

The study investigates how language is used to construct, reconstruct and deconstruct gender in opinion articles in Nigerian newspapers. Drawing on tools and techniques of analysis from critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, systemic functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, the author analyses the many complex and subtle ways in which gender is conceptualized and represented in the newspapers. He shows how the use of some linguistic features and discursive practices contributes to the (re)construction of certain gender identities, roles and power relations between men and women in society. The book contributes to research on language and gender from a non-western perspective.