ABSTRACT

Chapter 2 offers a review of research that has addressed various aspects of linguistic creativity online. The chapter begins with a discussion of research on creativity in computer mediated communication (CMC) from the 1990s, highlighting the contributions made by one of the first scholars to address this topic: Brenda Danet, in her 2001 monograph, Cyberplay. This is followed by a survey of more recent research on language and creativity online, focussing on digital communication from the era known as Web 2.0. This section discusses research on specific forms of online creativity, such as fan fiction, YouTube videos, as well as internet memes. This review of research demonstrates that recent scholarship dedicated exclusively to the topics of linguistic creativity, language play, and humour in digital media is limited to just a few articles and a handful of book chapters. Moreover, many of these have focussed either on the more formal properties of language, or on older digital genres. After surveying the state of research, it is evident that additional studies on this topic are needed which adopt a discourse perspective and which consider data from a wider range of social media platforms.