The objective of the study “Exploring the Digital Playground of Language and Semiotics: Building a Revised Framework for Critical Multimodal Analysis of Digital Discourse on Social Media” is to validate or disprove that qualitative methodological frameworks in digital discourse analysis of sociolinguistic practices on social media are inadequate, invalid and unreliable.
Two hypotheses were formulated to form more concrete objectives of scrutiny: 1) Current qualitative methods in digital discourse analysis are somewhat ineffective, because the field of digital discourse is changing too rapidly for former academic claims to be valid; and 2) current qualitative methods in digital discourse analysis are unreliable, because scholars and researchers often dismiss the significance of multimodality in digital discourse practices.
The study applies and combines traditional considerations and practices from critical discourse analysis with current observations in the field of digital discourse analysis, which are brought to light through a narrative literature review of qualitative methods in the field. Through critical synthesis and review of relevant literature findings, it is made possible to build a new framework coined critical multimodal analysis of digital discourse, which is then applied in a case study of comments on Facebook in order to evaluate and reexamine whether the framework can facilitate an analysis that considers linguistic, technological, semiotic and ideological aspects of computer-mediated communication on social media.
Through the analysis, in which the framework is applied, it is concluded that the framework effectively considers both macro-level and micro-level perspectives of discourse analysis, thus providing considerable insights to the multi-faceted nature of socialising in the virtual world. In regarding the technological affordances of the platform under scrutiny, the context of the text, the actual text and lastly the ideologies expressed through the affordances and the text, the framework provides a versatile range of focal points in academic scrutiny of digital discourse.
Ultimately, the study concludes with an encouragement for further work to ‘flesh out’ the framework, as it is currently presented as a preliminary outline that will benefit additional advancement in which not only the aspects of analysis provided in this study is applied, but also the relationship between them, as well as considering how they transplant from the online world to the real world.