ABSTRACT
Digital technologies have given rise to a host of new ways for people to communicate, manage social relationships, and get things done, which are challenging how we think about love and friendship, work and play, health and fitness, learning and literacy, and politics and citizenship. In order to cope with the fast-changing landscape of digital media, discourse analysts need to both draw upon the rich store of theories and methods developed over the years for the analysis of ‘analogue’ discourse, and to formulate new concepts and new methodologies to address the unique combinations of affordances and constraints introduced by digital media. Digital practices are always ‘nestled’ or ‘nested’ with other cultural practices, some new and some old, to form what Scollon has referred to as a ‘nexus of practice’, a configuration of tools and actions with various conventions and histories associated with them which come together to form recognisable sequences of actions, to make available to actors recognisable social identities.
