The texts and contexts of Facebook groups in a social semiotic perspective

Abstract

Based on the principles of Social Semiotics, Systemic Functional Theory and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, this project will provide contrastive analyses of sixteen posts instantiated in two Facebook 'groups' - that is, in spaces where users of the platform congregate due to, among other factors, common interests, professional reasons and 'identitary' issues in general. The aim is to achieve a nuanced understanding of the multimodal discursive practices of each group, so as to empirically investigate, based on the categories proposed by Hasan (1999, 2009, 2014), the relationship between situational context and the texts in question. Thus, we will seek to present a detailed description of which general contextual parameters and their semiotic correlates are stable in each group, possibly characterizing each one globally; at the same time, we will discuss the presence of multimodal practices which are internal to each group and diverse, but also presumably typified, and which would be associated with more delicate parameters. Therefore, this study will enable an empirically grounded understanding of how 'groups', which are important spaces within Facebook, but to date have received relatively little attention from text and discourse studies, deal with the idiosyncrasies of digital contextual configurations - among which is the phenomenon known as 'context collapse'. Considering the importance that digital discourse has assumed in contemporary society, such a study may have relevant results both in theorizing about the nature of such discourse and also in applied aspects, such as in critical views of Facebook groups as "ideological niches" or even in considerations about the use of such spaces as educational tools.