Positioning and Identity in Digital Discourse

Abstract

The impact of the digital transformation has been profound and far-reaching on communication and the transfer of knowledge. The aim of the present issue is to look into the different social practices originating from different settings of knowledge circulation and ultimately into the consequences of the (perceived) empowerment of non-experts and democratization of the Internet in the digital transformation. Generally, in communicative situations where online users can express their opinion freely, knowledge communication may be influenced and hampered by oppositional discourse practices, conspirational thinking, and by practices that contribute to group polarization, confirmation bias and the search for affiliative relations. Key questions behind the construction of communities concern basically identity construction and negotiation, and how this is achieved in human online interaction as well as via channel and medium’s affordances, in CMC and SNSs. Whether we look at individuals or individual communities in their self-representation or we look at how communities are defined by difference in their conflictual relationship with other communities, identity is inextricably interwoven with positioning. The link between the two has long been in focus in discourse studies paying attention to the resources for negotiation of social identities and intergroup relations, also in relation to community formation. When focusing then on lexical choice in digital discourse, the construction of identity is thus inextricably linked with the identification of ideologies underlying digital discourse, with a focus on how lexical resources are employed to enact identities, activities, and somehow ideologies. Although significant inroads are made into multimodal and semiotic aspects of the texts under scrutiny, the dominant methodological standpoints in the issue are corpus analysis and discourse analysis. This enables contributors to primarily address verbal aspects of positioning and status, credibility and trust, as well as the expression of attitude, point of view and ideologies – which ultimately reflects different folk epistemologies and social stereotypes, and specific takes on old and new cultural keywords.