Panel 1: Influencer Discourse: Navigating the Spectrum from Positive to Negative Impact

By Dawn Archer, Daria Dayter, Frazer Heritage and Sofia Rüdiger

This panel centers on the multifaceted discourses of social media influencers, considering their role as pivotal actors in shaping public opinion and cultural norms – for the better or the worse. Influencers can, for instance, promote progressive social change, foster inclusive communities, and contribute meaningfully to health discourses. However, they may also propagate misleading information, reinforce harmful stereotypes, and exploit vulnerable audiences for commercial gain. Our panel brings together contributions that analyze these dual aspects of influencer discourse to critically assess the linguistic and rhetorical techniques influencers employ, to understand their impact on various demographic groups, and to explore the ethical dimensions of their messaging. By considering both positive influence and detrimental impact, this panel offers a nuanced understanding of influencer discourse and contributes to ongoing discussions about media literacy, digital ethics, and the role of social media in shaping contemporary public discourse. Presenters are recruited to the panel via an open call, with the aim of representing different approaches to digital discourse analysis, including, but not restricted to, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal analysis.

Panel 2: From raising awareness to propaganda: influencing culture(s) on social media

By Michael Wentker, Ana Piroh and Birte Bös

This panel explores the multifaceted nature embraced in the syntactic ambiguity of ‘influencing culture(s)’: On the one hand, it aims to shed light on deliberate acts of shaping culture through targeted messaging and on the other hand, it aims to further our understanding of social media spheres where influencing is a central characteristic of contemporary culture. 

Influencing culture can range from well-intentioned attempts to promote positive social change, such as raising awareness about public health issues or advocating for social justice, to more questionable or even harmful objectives, such as spreading misinformation, reinforcing stereotypes and advancing political agendas. The motivations behind these actions can be altruistic, self-serving, or somewhere in between, making it difficult to clearly define the ethical boundaries. Furthermore, what begins as a benign attempt can gradually morph into something more coercive or propagandistic, especially as messages are repeated, amplified, de- and recontextualized. 

We invite contributions exploring mechanisms, agents and practices of ‘influencing culture(s)’, including different values, norms and expectations of online communities.

Panel 3: Structuring queerness, queering structures: social media and LGBTQ+ identities

By Jai Mackenzie and Johnny Unger

It is now well established that social media offer valuable infrastructures for the construction, documentation and affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities, communities and practices worldwide (Adams-Santos 2020; Tudor 2018). This panel contributes to ongoing conversation around the benefits, constraints and affordances of social media for queer individuals by bringing together innovative contemporary research on queer discourse and digital structures in a range of communities, cultures and contexts. Our contributors attend to the technological and discursive practices of queer digital media users in a range of geographical and cultural contexts, including Chinese gay influencers, non-binary Instagram users and British trans young people who use TikTok and Twitter/X. We pay particular attention to the ways in which the affordances and structures of social media platforms shape and constrain expressions of LGBTQ+ identities and intimacies, and how they are intertwined with regulatory structures including heteronormative, homonormative, cisnormative, binary and transnormative ideologies. At the same time, we consider the ways in which queer digital media users harness, subvert and reshape digital infrastructures, interfaces and algorithms as they construct meaningful identities and communities in relation to both local and global discourse on gender and sexuality.   

References 

Adams-Santos, D. (2020). Sexuality and digital space. Sociology Compass, 14(8), 1-15. 

Tudor, M. Desire Lines: Towards a Queer Digital Media Phenomenology (PhD Thesis). Stockholm: Södertörn University.

Panel 4: Imagining Visual Style: Prompts, Products, and Practice as Discursive Layers of AI Image Generation

By T.J. Thomson, Nataliia Laba and Janina Wildfeuer

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001) highlighted how digital technology increasingly transforms media into various forms of communication, and hence controls how meanings can be made. As a continuation of humanity’s efforts to represent (and control) culture and society, AI-enabled generative media presents a new challenge to the public understanding of discourses, design, production, and distribution of AI-generated artefacts. One significant change involves recontextualization of artistic style through transmediality (Bateman, 2017) or media convergence (Jenkins, 2008) – a techno-cultural transformation that integrates various media technologies into a single platform, resulting in shifting power dynamics between media producers, audiences, commercial actors, and socio-technical systems. 

This panel will explore how AI systems evaluate, describe, and recontextualize artistic styles while often perpetuating biases inherent in these datasets. We aim to uncover the complex interactions between generative media, creative practices, and social arrangements – and we will do so by applying an empirically-oriented approach to multimodality as well as a relational-materialist perspective (Bateman et al., 2017; Bueno et al., 2024), highlighting both the opportunities and ethical considerations these technologies present. In particular, we first examine how generative AI describes visual style and draw attention to which style attributes tend to be ignored and which are highlighted. We next address style recontextualization through text prompts used for generating. Lastly, we examine styles at the interplay between human and AI processing of stylistic prompts.

Panel 5: Pragmatics of Language Variation in Digital Discourse

By Jos Swanenberg, Kristel Doreleijers and Inge Beekmans

In digital discourse on social media platforms the form and meaning of words, images and punctuation often show variation and change. For example, the well-known exclamation mark which has been around for centuries, occurs on platforms in sequences like !!1!11, where it gets a new function, expressing mockery and ridiculing (Androutsopoulos 2023). 

Also in memes, we find digital discourse in the shape of images and texts with the aim to engage in ludic interaction with multiple audiences. Such memes often contain new forms, such as neologisms, spelling varieties and grammatical innovations (Doreleijers 2023), which add to the pragmatic and sociocultural meaning of the interaction. This type of digital discourse can only be fully comprehended by individuals who have a polycentric mix of specific types of insiders’ knowledge and digital literacy (Swanenberg & Beekmans subm.). In this panel, we will present and discuss studies on digital interaction and pragmatics, e.g., irony, mockery, ridicule, sarcasm, empathy, etc., and on how people understand or misunderstand the sociocultural meaning of such interactions.

References

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2023) Punctuating the other: Graphic cues, voice, and positioning in digital discourse. Language & Communication 88, 141-152, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2022.11.004

Kristel Doreleijers (2023) Enregistering Grammatical Gender: Indexing Brabantishness through Languagecultural Practices in Digital Tiles. Signs and Society 11, 237-259, https://doi.org/10.1086/726196

Swanenberg, Jos & Inge Beekmans (subm.) Memes and Tilburg: Chronotopes, identity work and place-making on @tilburgmeme. 

Panel 6: Mental Health Narratives in Digital Spaces: Platform-Specific Discourses and Interactions

By Morana Lukač, Andrew Lustig and Eva Triebl

Digital technologies have enabled the mass public negotiation of mental health by reducing stigma and reshaping its conceptualization. These technologies bridge divides between individuals with lived experiences of mental illness and mental health professionals, amplifying diverse voices in mental health discourse. 

This panel explores the digitally enabled interaction between individual and collective representations of mental health and the links between digital and non-digital social structures and discourses in which the human psyche is constituted, experienced, discussed, and regulated. Specifically, it examines how mental health identities and social practices are discursively enacted on platforms such as podcasts, Reddit, YouTube, and social media. Additionally, it investigates how the unique opportunities and constraints of these platforms—such as varying degrees of interactivity, visibility, and community formation, along with the policies and belief systems on which they are based and help shape—contribute to the shared understandings of mental health online. 

Contributions to this panel will analyze corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to explore how digitally constituted communities address mental health, how specific site functionalities are used to manage mental health interactions, and how conditions, symptoms, and mental health identities are negotiated across platforms through entextualization. We thus aim to advance scholarship on how digital infrastructures both constitute and are constituted by mental health discourses.

Panel 7: Pathologising identities online: tactics, effects and counteraction

By Manuel Padilla Cruz

Since their emergence, social networking sites and media have been prone to identity-related phenomena (e.g., Evans 2016; Georgalou 2017; Olauson 2017). One of such phenomena is pathologisation, or the portrayal of individuals, groups or institutions as irrational, immoral or unscrupulous (Cull 2019; Hagen 2020). Following Bucholtz and Hall (2005) and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Georgakopoulou (2021), pathologisation may be defined as the positional enactment of a detrimental identity through a variety of actions and strategies targeting the victim’s face. Among its effects, this pernicious practice may deshumanise, other and/or silence the victim (Cull 2019), and/or perpetrate epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007). Counteracting it requires forgiveness and social restitution (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2024). 

Relying on the corpus-based discursive pragmaƟc approach –corpus linguistics (Baker 2010; Gabrielatos 2018) and discursive pragmatics (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou 2019)–, this panel will look into pathologisation as attempted in X/Twitter and Instagram. It will analyse identity-motivated pathologising tactics, their contribution to testimonial injustice (Fricker 2006) and the connection between pathologisation and gaslighting (Bailey 2020; Spear 2020). Additionally, this panel will scrutinise the discursive articulation of forgiveness and social restitution aimed at overriding a pathologised identity