This article presents a critical multimodal discourse analysis of how people make meaning through the semiotic practice of shooting digital self-portraits (selfies), adding captions and then sharing these texts on the social network site Instagram. Combining theories from social semiotics, critical discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, the analysis focuses on the embedded ideological meaning in such digital communication. The analysis explores a data corpus of 100 selfies shared on Instagram. Despite the fact that digital texts shared on social media are generally regarded as personal communication, selfie makers seem to reproduce features of a commercial and global discourse. The typical way of representing oneself on Instagram appears to be surprisingly similar to visual representations in advertisements and image banks. The linguistic resources in use also appear globalized through a mix of languages combined with slang and abbreviations.
This article presents a study of how teenage immigrant students, newly arrived in Norway, constructed themselves discursively through a number of identity texts. Drawing on theories from New Literacy Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Social Semiotics, we analyzed a corpus of 97 multimodal identity texts. The study aimed to explore how the students contributed to their personal discursive construction in a society that was new to them. Our study showed that, while struggling with acquiring the dominant language, the immigrant students demonstrated linguistic and semiotic skills and talents. By analyzing the students' use of linguistic and visual resources, we identified three main categories of identity construction in the students' textsspatial identity, relational identity, and functional identity. The analysis suggested that, in their identity work, the immigrant students simultaneously internalized and challenged dominant discourses of the globalized society.
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