ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the place of language within a wider semiotic system that also involves image, sound and kinetic resources found typically in digital interaction. It provides a brief introduction to the key areas of linguistic work in social media. The chapter explains how more traditional and more recent approaches to the analysis of 'language' set out the different objects of interest that can be analysed in research of this kind. Early linguists sometimes ignored context entirely. However, since then, many of the more socially oriented approaches to language use have suggested that context is extremely important, even if it is hard to work out exactly what counts as 'context' and where it begins and ends. Much of the early research into computer-mediated communication was exclusively concerned with written language, because this was the only mode in which language could initially be used on the early Internet.
