Social Media Discourse: Towards the Problem of Interpretation

Abstract

The subject of research in this article is the social media discourse. The purpose of the work is to theoretically interpret the social media discourse in the context of modern science and practice of media communications. The study of social media discourse considers the features of the platforms, its production and storage, as well as its representation. Social media users can change their roles from being a consumer to a creator. The work uses a set of methods: comparative analysis, systematization, and interpretative analysis. The research found that the social media discourse is a functionally conditioned type of discourse (integration of personal and institutional types of discourse) that exists in the framework of online communication, and has the synthesis of oral and written speech. The social media discourse consists of media texts that include heterogeneous elements, depending on the combination of which creolized, polycode and multimodal texts are constructed. Such texts differ in the process of creation, organization and features of presentation in social media, communication in which, unlike electronic communication in general, is based on the principle of participation. Taking into account the specific features of distribution platforms used by social media, the authors emphasize that all Internet services related to social media have special characteristics that make it possible to distinguish them from other Internet services, resources that exist in the global network. The definition of the social media discourse allows us to expand the understanding of this category in modern media communications.