Language, Discourse, and New Media: A Linguistic Anthropological Perspective

Over the last few decades, an increasing number of scholarly articles and books have been published on language and new media. This article provides a brief overview of socioculturally informed studies on language and new media in addition to providing further directions for future scholarship. In this article, I show that it is promising to take an ethnographic and discourse‐centered approach to new media to demonstrate actual discursive practices and performances that are taking place in new media environments. Furthermore, I demonstrate that it is social actors/performers who mediate and negotiate (deploy and play with) various ideologies and semiotic resources in a given discursive encounter to accomplish artful performances. Thus, instead of primarily focusing on the already designed and constructed (a medium and its boundedness), we should focus on social actors and their playful performances. By employing an ethnographic/discourse analytic approach to language and new media, we can look at the circulation of discourses to better understand what new media mean for those who use them and how new media are localized into everyday practices and performances of social actors in their diverse geographical localities.