ABSTRACT
This chapter devotes precisely to the constraints that social media impose on traditional pragmatic research. Pragmatics studies the role of context when humans fill the gap between what is said and what is meant, and between what is listened to and what is interpreted. Crucial for social media is the fact that the characteristics of the different applications and environments for Internet communication and interaction. "Social media" is, precisely, a very generic label applied to all of these socially connoted uses of Internet communication. Herring defines social media as Web-based platforms that incorporate user-generated content and social interaction, often alongside or in response to structures and/or content provided by the sites themselves. The foundation of social media is the new discourses that, unlike the newspaper or the advertisement, have not been imported from their offline counterparts.
