This article explores how language is used to build community with the microblogging service, Twitter (www.twitter.com). Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL), a theory of language use in its social context, is employed to analyse the structure and meaning of ‘tweets’ (posts to Twitter) in a corpus of 45,000 tweets collected in the 24 hours after the announcement of Barak Obama’s victory in the 2008 US presidential elections. This analysis examines the evaluative language used to affiliate in tweets. The article shows how a typographic convention, the hashtag, has extended its meaning potential to operate as a linguistic marker referencing the target of evaluation in a tweet (e.g. #Obama). This both renders the language searchable and is used to upscale the call to affiliate with values expressed in the tweet. We are currently witnessing a cultural shift in electronic discourse from online conversation to such ‘searchable talk’.

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This article explores interpersonal meaning in social media photographs, using the representation of motherhood in Instagram images as a case study. It investigates the visual choices that are made in these images to construe relationships between the represented participants, the photographer, and the ambient social media viewer. The author draws upon existing work on the visual systems of point of view and focalization to explore interpersonal meaning in these images, and proposes that an additional system – subjectification – is needed to account for the kinds of relationship between the viewer and the photographer that are instantiated in social photographs, as well as the ways in which subjectivity is signaled in these images. The dataset analyzed is the entire Instagram feed of a single user who posts images of her experience of motherhood and a collection of 500 images using the hashtag #motherhood.

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As an iconic image of our time, the selfie has attracted much attention in popular media and scholarly writing. The focus so far has been on the representation of the self or subjectivity. We propose a complementary perspective that foregrounds the intersubjective function of the selfie. We argue that the presence of selfhood is often an assumption. What distinguishes the selfie from other photographic genres is its ability to enact intersubjectivity – the possibility for difference of perspectives to be created and this difference to be shared between the image creator and the viewer. Based on a social semiotic analysis of selfies on Instagram, we identify four subtypes of selfie, each deploying a combination of visual resources to represent a distinct form of intersubjectivity. Our analysis suggests that the potential for empowerment is inherent in the visual structure of the selfie, and that, as a genre, it is open for recontextualisation across contexts and social media platforms.

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds ( self-deprecation, frazzle and addiction) using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user.

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