Linguistic Elements as Tools for the Analysis of Media Narratives

Introduction

Society has been extensively immersed in media content for the last few decades, as the number of Internet users has reached almost 5 billion today, accounting for nearly 40% of the total population. At the same time, according to live data provided by InternetLiveStats, the number of internet sites will soon reach 2 billion. As Koltay (2011) notes, media content has an impact not only on the reader‘s views, but also influences human behaviour and our daily processes of communication as well as collaboration. The understanding of media becomes vital if media is seen as an opportunity for individuals to share digital messages and an opportunity to impact ones’ beliefs as well as present different kinds of information. The capability to analyse critically media information can help to understand the true depths of a story as well as identify the message which was meant to be sent to the reveivers. As Bernoff and Li (2008) suggest, social media as an ecosystem may be analysed from the participants’ perspective in their capacity as creators, critics, collectors, followers or spectators. Taking into account the type of social media, the information on social media can be seen as “half-life information” or “depth of information” (Weinberg & Pehlivan, 2011). The former refers to the time limit the information is seen as useful, while the latter is attributed to the richness of content the information provides.

Today’s media can be defined as a means of mass communication which disseminates the message to the readers (Crow & Lawlor, 2016). It can reach the public using different platforms, such as advocacy media, social media and other forms of information transfer. Moreover, the multiple actors in media can frame the message they send differently. Origin, production, content as well as effects of message can be constructed and designed using different framing techniques and processes which mostly depend on setting, intention, motive and effect the message should achieve (Mathes, 2012).

One of the most important things about media texts is the meaning that these texts are conveying. However, media texts often have a meaning which the reader is conscious of, but, in addition to that, there are other meanings which may be produced unconsciously by the reader (Burton, 2010). Then, readers choose whether they are controlling their engagement with the text or no, depending on their interests or experience. Thus, a text can mean different things for different readers. It can be said that “anything may be described as a text if people can engage with it to produce meanings about themselves, their society and their beliefs” (Burton, 2010, p. 6). The increasing number of possibilities of interactions in digital media allows individuals to become active participants in content creation as well as devour different kinds of media content. At the same time, social media offers huge potential for “mass-self communication” (Castells, 2013), introducing the forecasting and possible solutions for problems or raising sensitive issues. Multimedia discourse, as noted by Fairclough (2015), is compelling due to the power relations it contains. Nevertheless, these casual interactions and commitments between diverse activities, events, texts and structures of social and cultural life, as well as the reasons for their evolvement and influence, might be analysed by critical discourse analysis in order to explore why they are invisible.