ABSTRACT
Social media has a great deal of potential to rearticulate social meanings and to circulate new and alternative perspectives in society due to the rapid dispersal of ideas, images and discourse that digital technology affords. Drawing on foundational writings from linguistic anthropology and social semiotics, Leppänen et al. (2014) explain how entextualization and resemiotization are central to this rearticulation. While entextualization describes how participants (re)use language and semiotic resources to relocate and appropriate discourse from other contexts, resemiotization refers to the new meanings that are produced because of new arrangements and framings across modes and modalities. Rymes (2012) illustrates how this works in self-produced YouTube videos that resemiotize a range of material, from Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” election slogan to “Crank Dat”, a popular song by the American rapper Soulja Boy. When individuals remake videos like these and post them in social media, they are making “a bid at recognition by like-minded peers” (2012, p. 224) and, hence, are claiming belonging within a system of shared, reentextualized communicative repertoires. Similarly, Georgakopoulou (2014, see also this volume) shows how these processes can yield very different results. She traced how a televised assault of two female members of parliament (MPs) by a male MP on a Greek morning show became resemiotized on YouTube, with some versions acting as critiques of Greek politics and others using the backdrop of the incident to convey much more personal and nonserious narratives. By tracking the means by which texts and images are recycled in social media, studies such as these show how platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook can provide lay people with “new opportunities to actively engage with global media flows from a local perspective” (Androutsopoulos, 2010, p. 203).
