The electronic age lends itself to a deliberate action towards digitalization and this has led to the surge in discourses of and around digital economies. Scholarly claims of vagueness in African countries’ pursuit of the digital agenda and the political leverage of digitalization discourses by social actors are examined by this research to unveil the discursive constructions of Ghana’s digital agenda and its social actors. Using corpus methods and Discourse-Historical Approach to discourse analysis, the study employs a five-year corpus of speech by Ghana’s vice president as a primary data for the study. The analysis reveals three main ideologically motivated themes: digitalization as beneficial in several aspects of Ghana’s society, manifestations of Ghana’s digital exploits, and principal officers’ ideological stance on digitalization. Digitalization is presented as both a preventive and curative measure to Ghana’s economic challenges. The dominant collocates of ‘digital’ include address, revolution, divide, through, platforms and port. Social actors are positioned as visionary and pro-digitalization, with discursive strategies like anthroponyms, personal pronouns, perspectivization, and evaluative predicates employed to construct a political identity that aligns leadership legitimacy with digital transformation. The findings affirm the ideological motivations behind digitalization in Ghana, supporting claims that policy actors use digital discourse to construct political personas. Contrary to critiques of vagueness in African digital agendas, the study finds Ghana’s digitalization discourse to be coherent, policy-driven, and ideologically transparent. The study concludes that digitalization as a policy and ideology is clearly conceptualized in Ghana’s presidential discourses, and the discourse around digitalization is political.

ABSTRACT This article introduces “lharba” (escape or flight) as a central yet understudied vernacular formation in North African migration discourse, demonstrating how Moroccan youth articulate sophisticated critiques of necropolitical governance through everyday language practices. Drawing on digital ethnography of Facebook communities (2017–20) and auto-ethnographic engagement, the research grounds “lharba” as simultaneously a theological innovation, a political practice and a framework for collective identification that transcends physical mobility. The analysis advances three interconnected arguments: first, that lharba discourse operates as vernacular necropolitical theory through which abandonment produces social death in non-conflict settings; second, that theological innovations such as “lharba liman istataa’” (escape for those who are able) constitute autonomous political practices wherein excluded populations claim interpretive authority over Islamic tradition to justify migration as religious obligation responding to state failure; and third, that collective identification emerges through shared articulation of alienation rather than completed mobility, creating communities encompassing migrants, aspiring migrants and those who remain. By centring vernacular knowledge systems, the article demonstrates how migration scholarship gains analytical precision by attending to how subjects themselves theorise the conditions that produce their movement.

Abstract This study explores how a government-led city branding initiative can become a site of public contestation when symbolic meanings are not collectively negotiated. In 2025, the Jember Regency Government introduced the slogan “Semua Karena Cinta” (All Because of Love) and a pink-dominated visual identity as part of its official branding strategy. Using a qualitative case study approach grounded in a constructivist perspective, this research examines how the branding was interpreted, debated, and resisted in public communication spaces. Data were gathered from official government publications and Instagram content, online news coverage, social media comments, and in-depth interviews with community members, and analyzed through thematic coding with NVivo. The findings show that public resistance was driven by perceived misalignment between the pink symbolism and Jember’s socio-cultural identity, the saturation of visual symbols in public facilities, and a gap between the “love” narrative and visible political dynamics. Rather than outright policy rejection, resistance appeared mainly through humor, sarcasm, and critical digital discourse, indicating tensions in symbolic legitimacy. Theoretically, this study contributes to city branding scholarship by applying Issue Management Theory to interpret public resistance as an early signal of meaning misalignment. Practically, it highlights the importance of participatory and dialogic communication in sustaining trust and legitimacy in government branding initiatives.

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This study explores the intersection between social media discourse in West Sumatra and formal governmental processes, focusing on the cultural idiom Adat Basandi Syarak, Syarak Basandi Kitabullah (ABS–SBK). This Minangkabau moral framework is analyzed as a highly "amplifiable" tool within algorithmic media environments. Utilizing digital discourse analysis and online trace mapping, the research examines how moral emotions expressed online are magnified by media gatekeeping and subsequently integrated into formal policy deliberations. Theoretically, the study introduces "local-value-anchored digital populism" to explain how localized idioms become institutionally actionable within Indonesia’s regional politics. Data sources include social media content from key figures, user interactions, news reports, and official documents. The findings reveal a recurring affective-institutional pattern: digital emotions are amplified by news media and then translated by local authorities and customary institutions into formal regulations or initiatives. This dynamic emerges from the convergence of three forces: public emotions, social media algorithms, and institutional structures. When used as a moral frame, the ABS–SBK idiom bridges public affective responses with state procedures, transforming local values into policy language and sources of political legitimacy. Consequently, digital populism in West Sumatra serves as a form of symbolic power construction. It reconfigures the relationship between religion, customary authority, and the state within the digital public sphere, moving beyond mere value-based communication to influence formal institutional channels like bylaws and customary councils.

Social media platforms like Facebook have become key spaces for dynamic, multimodal communication, where users combine text, images, emojis, and other resources to construct meaning. In Filipino digital discourse, these practices reflect rich linguistic creativity and relational work, shaping how identity, social interaction, and meaning are negotiated online. This study examines the multimodal communicative practices of Filipino Facebook users, focusing on how linguistic and non-linguistic resources interact to construct meaning in computer-mediated discourse. Drawing on a corpus of 315 anonymized expressions from publicly accessible Facebook posts, the study employs a qualitative discourse-analytic approach grounded in multimodal discourse analysis and relational work theory. Methodological rigor is enhanced through brief interpretive interviews for communicative validation and expert linguistic review by two Filipino language scholars. The analysis identifies key linguistic features, including word-formation processes (blending, clipping, affixation, reduplication), sound-based expressions (interjections, letter elongation, onomatopoeia), non-standard orthography, and creative colloquial forms such as reverse spelling (sakalam from malakas). These linguistic resources co-occur with non-linguistic elements such as emojis, emoticons, GIFs, stickers, and images. Together, these multimodal resources perform expressive, phatic, humorous, and affiliative functions that support emotional clarity, relational work, and interactional efficiency in text-based digital environments. The findings demonstrate how Filipino users mobilize culturally specific multimodal repertoires, exemplified by emoji-anchored code-mixing (e.g., Favorite ko yan) and affectively charged respellings, to manage affect and social alignment in everyday digital interaction. By focusing on Filipino Facebook discourse, this study contributes to computer-mediated communication research by highlighting the culturally situated nature of multimodal meaning-making and challenging Anglocentric assumptions in digital discourse studies. The findings also offer implications for digital literacy education in multilingual Southeast Asian contexts.

ABSTRACT This study examines football diplomacy as a policy facilitating instrument and soft power resource in Vietnam – South Korea relations, rather than a deterministic source of influence. Moving beyond views of sport as symbolic or episodic engagement, it conceptualises football diplomacy as a sequential, negotiated, and institutionally embedded process linking cultural, economic, and governance dimensions of bilateral cooperation. Using a convergent mixed methods design, the study integrates digital discourse analysis, media and policy analysis, and secondary economic indicators from 2017 to 2025. The findings identify a seven-stage model through which football evolves from spontaneous admiration to bilateral co development via articulation, negotiation, economic signalling, institutionalisation, and recalibration. These stages show how governments, coaches, and publics transform football into a sustained yet contingent framework that facilitates cooperation without directly determining policy outcomes. The study refines soft power theory by positioning symbolic attraction as an outcome, rather than the origin, of influence, contingent on institutional embedding, local agency, and reciprocal engagement. It further highlights a shift from asymmetric learning towards partnership-based cooperation, as Vietnamese leadership and continued Korean collaboration support co production and inclusive governance. Overall, the findings clarify both the enabling capacity and structural limits of football diplomacy in contemporary international relations.

This study investigates the strategic use of Japanese addressee honorific (AH) and plain forms in written self-introductions on a gay dating application in Japan. While earlier approaches posited a one-to-one relationship between AH and politeness, treating AH as governed by socially prescribed norms, more recent indexical approaches argue that speakers strategically deploy these forms to construct interactional meanings. To examine whether such strategic use extends to written digital discourse, 50 profile self-introductions were collected, yielding 493 clause-final predicates (318 AH; 175 plain). Although AH forms predominated overall (64.5%), substantial individual variation and frequent style mixing were observed. A binomial linear mixed-effects model tested whether relationship-seeking intentions (friendship, long-term partnership, brief encounters) predicted AH use. Results show that users seeking friendship were significantly more likely to use AH forms, while this effect was attenuated when long-term relationship intentions were simultaneously signaled. These findings demonstrate that AH and plain forms function as strategic, indexical resources shaped by interactional goals rather than as fixed markers of politeness.

Background: This study examines how medical consumption is discussed in online communities among individuals who are blind or visually impaired using the Social Ecological Model (SEM) to capture multilevel healthcare experiences within digital discourse. Methods: A total of 428 posts and comments were collected from Reddit’s r/Blind community. Term frequency–inverse document frequency keyword extraction and a theory-driven LLM-based classification approach were applied to categorize texts into five SEM levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community, and public policy. Results: The findings show that intrapersonal (44.4%) and public policy (29.8%) levels were the most prominent, indicating a strong emphasis on personal coping experiences alongside structural constraints in healthcare access. Institutional-level discourse accounted for 15.8%, whereas interpersonal (6.2%) and community (3.8%) discourse were relatively limited. Keywords and qualitative analyses revealed themes related to emotional adaptation, social support, service accessibility, mobility constraints, and welfare policy barriers. The Jaccard similarity analysis indicated stronger associations between institutional and policy levels, whereas community-level discourse remained relatively distinct. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of understanding healthcare experiences, both individually and structurally, in online environments. This study also demonstrated the potential of integrating LLM-based classification with theory-driven frameworks to enable an interpretable and scalable analysis of complex health-related discourse.

Purpose This study explores how issues related to the Malaysian Certificate of Education (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia, SPM) are discussed and disseminated on Platform X, with a specific focus on identifying key influencers, popular narratives and community dynamics within the digital discourse. Design/methodology/approach Social network analysis was conducted using NodeXL on 1,279 tweets containing the keyword “Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia”, posted between 2 March 2022 and 27 February 2025. The study identified influential users through betweenness centrality and visualised the network structure using the Clauset–Newman–Moore clustering algorithm. Findings The analysis identified 596 unique users, including the 10 most influential accounts, most used hashtags and the most frequently shared URLs. The top influential users demonstrated betweenness centrality score ranging from 1814.5 (first-ranked user) to 188 (tenth-ranked user). The network structure revealed distinct clusters, with educational institutions and ministry-affiliated accounts fostering supportive, community-based engagement, while public users expressed a divergent perspective on the SPM examination. Research limitations/implications The findings are based solely on data retrieved from Platform X and are limited to a specific keyword within a defined time frame, which may not capture all relevant conversations. Future studies could incorporate multi-platform analysis or longitudinal tracking to enrich understanding of digital discourse in education policy and reform. Originality/value This study demonstrates the robustness of SNA in examining the dynamics of educational discourse in digital spaces. It provides novel insights into the role of weak and strong ties in shaping public narratives, offering a digital lens into how SPMs are perceived and discussed in Malaysia.

The increasing use of social media has transformed sport photography from a form of visual documentation into a complex medium of digital discourse and visual semiotics. This study examines sport photography as a multimodal communicative practice while simultaneously synthesizing empirical evidence through a meta-analytic approach. The urgency of this research lies in the fragmentation of previous studies, which tend to examine engagement, branding, or gender representation separately without providing an integrative and quantitative synthesis. This study employs a systematic literature review and meta-analysis following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, analyzing 30 peer-reviewed studies published between 2022 and 2026. Of these, only studies with sufficient quantitative data were included in the meta-analysis, while the remaining studies supported qualitative synthesis. The findings reveal a moderate overall effect size (g = 0.44), indicating that sport photography has a significant yet context-dependent influence on audience engagement and perception. The heterogeneity value (I² = 64.3%) demonstrates substantial variation across platforms, cultural contexts, and methodological approaches. These results indicate that sport photography functions not only as visual representation but also as a dynamic semiotic resource that constructs meaning, identity, and ideological discourse in digital environments. In conclusion, this study contributes by integrating digital discourse, visual semiotics, and meta-analysis to provide a comprehensive understanding of sport photography in contemporary media.

The rapid proliferation of digital communication has fundamentally altered the processes through which linguistic identities are constructed and negotiated. This study investigates the role of linguistic patterns in digital discourse in shaping identity across social media platforms, including Twitter (X), Instagram, and TikTok. Utilizing a qualitative discourse-analytic methodology, this research examines a corpus of 250 user-generated posts, concentrating on key features such as code-switching, translanguaging, lexical innovation, multimodality, and platform-specific language use. The findings indicate that identity in digital contexts is dynamic, fluid, and performative, emerging through the strategic deployment of linguistic resources and semiotic resources. Multilingual practices, particularly code-switching and translanguaging, enable users to construct hybrid identities that reflect both local affiliations and global orientations (García, 2009; Canagarajah, 2011). Lexical innovation and informal language serve as indicators of group membership and digital belonging (Crystal, 2006; Coulmas, 2005), whereas multimodal elements such as emojis and hashtags enhance affective expression and social positioning (Herring, 2004). The study further underscores the impact of platform affordances and audience design on linguistic behavior, demonstrating that identity construction is socially and technologically mediated (Androutsopoulos, 2015). Finally, the findings contribute to sociolinguistic and digital discourse research by illustrating how language functions as a flexible and strategic resource for constructing identity in digitally mediated environments.

This article examines 466 YouTube comments posted in response to CNN’s coverage of Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration to explore how symbolic convergence operates beyond consensus in algorithmically mediated digital discourse. Drawing on Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT) and Agenda-Setting Theory, the study analyzes how symbolic cues activate situational, character-based, symbolic, and action-oriented fantasy themes that crystallize into competing rhetorical visions. The findings indicate a predominance of negative sentiment, particularly through situational and character-based fantasies that frame the inauguration as a moment of democratic crisis. At the same time, positive and neutral fantasies sustain narratives of national restoration, legitimacy, and resilience. Rather than converging toward shared agreement, these fantasy chains stabilize antagonistic meanings through affective alignment and narrative repetition shaped by platform visibility logistics. By integrating netnography with thematic analysis, this study conceptualizes YouTube comment spaces as an affective-symbolic arena in which symbolic convergence functions as a mechanism for producing and sustaining affective polarization. In doing so, the article advances SCT by demonstrating that convergence in platform-mediated political discourse operates through the algorithmic stabilization of competing symbolic realities rather than consensus formation.

ABSTRACT This study is focussed on the ideological implications of the entertainisation of collective memory of “China–Africa friendship” in danmu (also bullet comments or danmaku) genre by Chinese youth. The historical narrative of China–Africa relations is revisited from the perspective of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. This article incorporates two key concepts from entertainment affect studies, namely, eudaimonic affects (reflective, enduring ones) and hedonic affects (pleasure-oriented, immediate ones), and integrates them with ideological square within the CDA tradition. It addresses the asymmetrical distribution of these entertainment-generated affects within the collective memory framework of China–Africa relations. Specifically, we investigate how danmu discourse invests different entertainment affects in depictions of China, African countries, and their bilateral ties. Findings show that China is predominantly associated with eudaimonic representations (e.g. proud, poignant), while African countries are often subjected to hedonic portrayals (e.g. transient pleasure). Also, China’s “suspicious” acts in Africa (e.g. economic aids for resources) are more likely to relate with hedonic affects, as a result of mitigating potential and existing accusations of neo-colonialism in Africa. Ultimately, all these reveal ideological hierarchies within Chinese public digital discourse, reinforce a “China-dominant, Africa-dependent” ideology, and imply the emerging confidence nationalism on Chinese digital platforms.

This article employs a Foucauldian framework of governmentality to examine how singing talent shows operate as cultural apparatuses that shape institutional, ideological, and administrative influence over popular memory. A Foucauldian discourse analysis foregrounds the ways discourse, visual representation, and strategic silence work as techniques of governance that guide how the public perceives, feels, and remembers, while also revealing the subtle interplay between power and knowledge in producing “truths.” Through an analysis of the Cantopop-themed talent show Infinity and Beyond, coproduced by Hong Kong–based Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and Mainland China’s provincial satellite network Hunan TV, this study demonstrates how the program actively sanitizes and reprograms popular memory of Cantopop, particularly for a Mainland Chinese audience. The show emphasizes the integration of Hong Kong culture into the Mainland’s dominant narrative, promoting national unity and presenting a curated account of the genre’s development—recontextualizing its hybridity to align cultural memory with contemporary national integration goals. As a supplementary dimension, the analysis contrasts these official mnemonic framings with diverse narratives circulating on social media, specifically across Mainland platforms (Weibo) and international platforms (X). This comparison illustrates how digital discourse complicates top-down memory construction and exposes tensions between state-aligned memory initiatives and dispersed, networked practices of recollection.

The article presents a cognitive-discursive analysis of intertextual and pragmatic mechanisms involved in constructing the archetypal image of Iran as an enemy in English-language digital discourse. The subject of the study is the intertextual and pragmatic mechanisms underlying enemy image formation in user comments on the Reddit platform. The aim is to identify and systematize these mechanisms and to describe their interaction. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing role of user-generated digital discourse in shaping public opinion on international conflicts, as well as by insufficient scholarly attention to the cognitive-discursive mechanisms of enemy image construction in online comments. The corpus comprises 300 comments published on Reddit during the US military operation "Epic Fury". The methodology includes cognitive-discursive analysis drawing on C. G. Jung's theory of archetypes, V. Ya. Propp's narrative morphology, G. Lakoff and M. Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, E. W. Said's concept of Orientalism, J. Culpeper's impoliteness theory, and T. A. van Dijk's ideological square model. The analysis identified three archetypal enemy models: "absolute evil" (Iran as an existential threat), "enemy of the Christian world" (emphasis on religious confrontation), and "barbarian" (dehumanization through zoomorphic metaphors and markers of uncivilizedness). The findings demonstrate that these mechanisms operate in a mode of cognitive resonance, mutually reinforcing their impact on the reader. The novelty lies in applying an integrative cognitive-discursive model to user-generated digital discourse and in identifying the cognitive resonance mechanism. The results are applicable to developing digital political discourse models, media literacy education, and information-psychological countermeasures.

This study Research This study analyzes the social criticism discourse presented by female comedians in the Adu Cuanda x TAYTB Women Warriors program on OCBC YouTube, placing digital media as a space for women's advocacy and empowerment. Based on Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Rodney H. Jones et al.'s analysis of digital discourse, this study highlights aspects of text, context, interaction, and power relations and ideology. The results show that the comedians raise issues of gender, culture, family, economics, politics, morals, and religion, including stereotypes, objectification, subordination, double burdens, socio-economic inequality, and religious and mental health stigma. These findings confirm that stand-up comedy functions as a medium for social criticism and empowerment, while YouTube serves as an inclusive digital space for the struggle for gender equality.

ABSTRACT This paper examines “professional vision” in sponsored everyday vlogging—video blogging that integrates paid promotions into daily life—and analyzes how sponsored everyday vlogging is made both relatable and commercially viable. Bringing together Goffman's notion of “frame laminations,” developed in interactional sociolinguistics, and Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic understanding of “framing,” I show how sponsored everyday vlogging simultaneously enacts living, vlogging, and selling life multimodally. I demonstrate how structure, written captions, and visuals interact to produce the co-occurrence of different “frame laminations”—embedding (one frame within another), overlapping (one frame extended over to another, creating two simultaneous meanings), and blending (intentionally engaging in two concurrent activities)—and how these processes construct identities of vlogger, everyday self, and marketer. Sponsored everyday vlogging fabricates “commodifiable authenticity,” transforming daily experience into marketable content and vice versa. This study highlights how interactional sociolinguistics and social semiotics can productively work together for multimodal digital discourse analysis.

Anchored in the “ Hegang ” phenomenon and the recent contradictory buzzwords on Weibo, this study proposes a theoretical framework of digitalized cruel mobility that demonstrates how digital discourses on social media platforms do not merely reflect but actively construct and intensify a forced, cyclical mobility of young skilled migrants between two objects of cruel optimism. Through a qualitative analysis of Weibo discourses and supplementary Hegang -migrants’ interviews, this study draws upon the concepts of “cruel optimism,” “cruel (im)mobility,” and “cruel optimism of mobility,” further unpacking the complicated paradoxes and cyclic dynamics of hope and cruelty constructed by skilled migrants on Weibo. The findings demonstrate the precarity of fendou dreams in first-tier cities, shown in the paradoxes of material and affective aspects, while migrants discursively construct and imagine Hegang as their hopeful promises and alternative desires. However, such new promises have ended up being debated and critiqued, which leads to a new cruel optimism of mobility.

The use of digital media such as YouTube now serves not only as a means of entertainment but also as an interesting educational interaction space to be studied from a pragmatic perspective. This study aims to describe the forms and functions of representative speech acts in the 2025 UTBK General Reasoning Questions Parts 1 and 2 videos on the Privat Al Faiz YouTube channel. This study uses a pragmatic approach with a qualitative descriptive method. Data were collected through free listening and note-taking techniques, then analyzed using matching and distribution methods to identify the context, illocutionary meaning, and function of each representative speech act, which were then presented in both formal and informal formats. The analysis identified 218 representative speech acts across eight types: explaining, stating, informing, mentioning, suggesting, acknowledging, giving examples, and speculating. The most dominant types were explaining and stating because they served to clarify the material and guide the audience to understand the logical flow of reasoning. These findings show that representative speech acts in digital learning do not merely convey information but also play a role in building reflective instructional communication between teachers and students. Theoretically, this study enriches pragmatic studies in the realm of digital discourse, while practically, it can be a reference for educators in developing effective and adaptive communication strategies for the development of educational technology.