This study focuses on the major sociocultural attributes of communication via Facebook in two different geographical settings. It identifies cross-cultural differences among two different student cohorts in the UAE and the UK. Sociocultural specificities were addressed by means of quantitative surveying complemented by qualitative interviewing. The social information processing (SIP) theory and Geerte Hofstede theory of ‘cultural dimensions’ represented the epistemological framework for the study. The findings indicate that although the users shared similar responses in terms of their preferences and uses, the study shows that they differ in certain key points related to online behaviour and communication modes (e.g. preferences for contacting friends), conceptualization of Facebook (an extension to university life or a portal to the world) and issues of privacy (expressing oneself openly). These deviations reflect essentially a cultural dissimilarity, which is a core point of the study.
This article takes a multimodal discourse approach to women’s fashion in the Middle East. It places the Islamic abaya in the UAE in the context of the wider literature on fashion and identity, exploring the way in which clothing features and forms can prescribe ideas, values and attitudes, and framing this discussion within newer ideas on globalization. As Roland Barthes argued, it is not so much personal choice or diversity in fashion that is of interest, but the kinds of values and expected behaviours that they imply. The abaya, on the one hand, represents a more newly arrived idea of traditional, local and religious identity, linking to some extent to an imagined sense of a monolithic notion of Islamic clothing. But, on the other hand, this is itself reformulated locally through international representations, ideas and values, and integrated with newer ideas of taste.
While there have been debates within gender studies on the gendering of the body and of the gendered nature of clothing, this paper shows that multimodality, with its attention to the finer details of communication, can provide a way to help us to think more carefully about how fashion communicates ideas and identities through textile affordances such as form, texture, weight, durability, colour, etc. Taking hijab fashion in Egypt as a case in point, a multimodal approach is able to reveal how Muslim women use clothing to communicate a number of different discourses simultaneously. These include modesty, religious identity and tradition, on the one hand, and freedom, confidence and modernity, on the other. This analysis allows us both to problematise the monolithic representations of Islamic clothing usually found in Western media, and also to think more carefully about the ways in which clothing both constrains and enables women’s agency.
This paper focuses on the display of identity on Facebook, and more specifically on how undergraduate students in Cardiff, Wales, say they express identity on their profiles. The theoretical context of this study is observed processes of change in the way we play out identity through what have been described as globalisation, deterritorialisation and the rise of lifestyle consumer society. The paper is based on an analysis of responses from a questionnaire and interviews with 100 students from Media and Communication degrees at the University of Glamorgan. The data collection is designed to indicate what kinds of self-categorisation are used. These data are analysed using Social Actor Analysis developed by Machin and Van Leeuwen. The paper shows that we find a range of identity categories, some that are based around a biological model of national identity, while others focus on a belonging to a territory, others on national cultural activities and yet others link to lifestyle identity. What is most notable in this Welsh sample is the high use of nationalist identity categories and biological ethnic classification alongside other lifestyle identities.
This is a largely theoretical reflection on cross-cultural communications online, which focuses in particular on how social media have changed society, and what direction discourse studies could take to engage these new platforms. The global communication landscape has been fundamentally transformed and shifted the ways in which identities and communities play out. In order to understand how best to investigate this the paper considers some of the challenges for a discourse approach to multicultural communication on social media.
The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media despite a number of notable scholarly works. But as yet there has been little that has dealt specifically with issues of multicultural discourse – how language, identity, cross-cultural social relations and power play out in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media. In this paper, I show why discourse studies must engage with theories and empirical work on social media across academic fields beyond discourse studies and linguistics, at how these can help best frame the kinds of research that needs to be done, how to best formulate some of the basic questions of critical discourse analysis for this new communicative environment. I use this as a platform to point to the areas where multicultural discourse studies can work – where all the ambiguities of former studies of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are present, but realised in new ways. Yet these new forms of communication are fused into wider patterns of changing cultural values about forms of social structure, knowledge itself and the kinds of issues that tend to form our individually civic spheres.
This paper uses a social semiotic approach to analyse the posts of women fitness experts/influencers on Chinese Weibo. On the posts, we find a harmonized world where all parts of life can be managed by making the right choices and by having a striving attitude. Here, success and happiness become tasks to be worked on. Yet this is a decontextualized world, where there is no room for actual situations and dispositions. We discuss how these representations can be related to rising neoliberal ideas, values, and identities among the new Chinese middle classes, which, in these instances, are used to create a rather overdetermined stance against more traditional Confucian women's roles with an emphasis on caring, knowing one's position, and kinship obligations. But the one-size-fits-all rhetoric of empowerment, getting-ahead and choice leaves little room for sharing the actual restrictions, conflicts, and struggles faced by these women.
This article analyses an award-winning film produced as part of the Chinese government's 'Healthy China Initiative' to increase awareness of cervical cancer among young women. The film was designed to be social media friendly, using a more accessible popular style, and it achieved over 350 million views on Chinese social media. The aim had been to shift away from a tradition of more formal, authoritative public information content. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis in the broader tradition of critical health communication studies, the findings support other critics of Chinese public health information in relation to women's reproductive health. Despite the accessible style, the authors find a highly conservative ideology of womanhood, where the actual nature of cervical cancer, caused by the very common Human Papillomavirus, is obscured in a highly moralized message about sexual abstinence. The film also represents a view of Chinese health services that glosses the difficulty of access for many, as well as public concerns about corruption and clientelism.