Skip to main content
NCBI home page
NIHPA Author Manuscripts logoLink to NIHPA Author Manuscripts
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2024 Jan 1.
Published in final edited form as: Journal Stud. 2022 Nov 26;24(2):153–171. doi: 10.1080/1461670x.2022.2150264

A three-dimensional model of news recirculation: towards a unified understanding of news sharing

Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein
PMCID: PMC10120862  NIHMSID: NIHMS1853400  PMID: 37089446

Abstract

This paper responds to calls for theory-building about news sharing on social media, arguing for a unified understanding of sharing practices both online and off. Developing a theoretical understanding of news sharing requires broadening our gaze to include other communicative technologies, such as postal mail, email, voice calls, and in-person conversation. In a conceptual contribution based on reflections about my participation in long-term multi-method collaborative studies in the US, I argue that news sharing is an act of commitment at the core. I also propose a three-dimensional model of news recirculation. The first two dimensions, publicness and ephemerality, are ideological – although they widely misrecognized as properties of specific channels and platforms. People enact a third dimension of practice, voice, when they recirculate news.

Keywords: news sharing, circulation, epistemic commitment, commitment events

1. Introduction: On News and Newness

Whenever my grandfather read an article he thought I would like, until his death in 2014, he painstakingly clipped it out of the newspaper and mailed it to me. I grew up discussing the day’s news over dinner, and to this day, I cannot call my father without being asked if I am aware of some news item or other. If I say no, he reads the story to me over the phone. And when my partner wants me to read or watch some news report, he simply passes me his phone or computer.

As these examples make clear, the act of recirculating news reports is not necessarily a digital one (cf. Hermida et al., 2012), even if the word ‘sharing’ now carries strong, perhaps unavoidable, associations with social media (cf. Lange, 2018). Simply put, people talk about the news they see, both online (Johansson, 2017; Weeks and Holbert, 2013) and off (Southwell and Torres, 2006). That makes it impossible to understand news practices without understanding news talk, the ways that people informally circulate and comment on news stories (Bird, 2011, pp. 494–5).

A relatively recent literature review (Kümpel et al., 2015) calls for explicit theory-building on the topic of social media news sharing, and more than a few scholars have taken up this call (e.g. Bigman et al., 2019; Carlson, 2020; Kalogeropoulos et al., 2017; Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018; Lottridge & Bentley, 2018; Picone et al., 2016). In contrast to these scholars, I argue that we can only develop a theoretical understanding of news sharing practices1 on social media platforms if we broaden our gaze beyond social media to include other communicative technologies, such as postal mail, email, voice calls, and in-person conversation. An understanding of news sharing practices that considers both online and offline behavior has several advantages.

Most importantly, this approach helps us understand news sharing practices holistically, and in a way that better matches news users’ experience of it. Users generally understand communicative technologies as an environment of possibilities rather than as discrete or independent from one another (Madianou and Miller, 2012). Furthermore, as recent scholarship in anthropology highlights, people treat Facebook and other social networking sites as inextricable from offline social practices: many interactions on these sites start from the tacit assumption ‘that the online persona mapped directly onto an offline person’ (Manning and Gershon, 2013: 125). So it comes as no surprise that people make sense of news through offline and multi-modal relationships in addition to online ones (see, e.g. Bird, 2011; Heikkilä and Ahva, 2015).

An integrated understanding also helps us situate online news sharing in the context of earlier practices like mailing newspaper clippings and discussing the day’s news, many of which are still widespread. Contrary to assumptions of radical change, social and mobile media have largely deepened existing practices of news engagement rather than radically replacing them (e.g., Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015). As Thurlow (2017) observes, both scholarly and media discourses of digital media tend to focus on newness (see also Gershon, 2010; 2017) at the expense of continuity with the past, such that ‘[t]he newness and distinctiveness of digital media is invariably exaggerated’ (Thurlow, 2017: 14). As a corrective to this tendency, I start from a consideration of ‘the practice of giving a defined set of people access to news content,’ expanding the definition provided by Kümpel and colleagues (2015), which is limited to social media. Nor does this paper assume that online and offline news sharing are identical (cf. Bird, 2011: 500). Instead, I argue that a unified understanding of sharing practices lays the groundwork to study similarities between digital and analog sharing in addition to the differences between them.

2. Background, or: How I Know What I Know

This paper is primarily conceptual in nature, synthesizing literature from linguistic anthropology, communication, science and technology studies, and journalism studies. However, it is informed by my participation since 2017 in an ongoing collaboration between a research organization and a major US news organization, and my auto-ethnographic reflections on it. This collaboration comprises three multi-year research studies on STEM and health news media use in the US, as well as a half-dozen smaller studies about news use across a broad range of topics. Each study includes participatory activities with journalists (see Barchas-Lichtenstein et al., 2020) alongside a range of data collection activities with news users. In general, data collection focused on the differences between three channels for discussing and sharing news: social media (understood by our team at that time as relatively public digital communication, compare Aichner et al. 2021), email (understood as relatively private digital communication), and description or conversation (understood as relatively private voice conversation).2 In some cases, respondents delved into distinctions within each of these categories.

Except for the participatory research, these studies were not ethnographic in their conception and design: surveys and focus groups rely on self-report rather than observation. In this paper, I interpret them through anthropological epistemology — I ‘think like an anthropologist’ (Engelke, 2018). For me, that means taking an interactionist approach to all data, even surveys (Raclaw et al., 2020). It also means constant attention to power and context and a critical eye towards received wisdom. For example, I encourage my journalist interlocutors to reflect on social and sociotechnical factors underlying demographic differences in platform usership, rather than stopping at conclusions like ‘Facebook is older’ or ‘Twitter is less White.’

Research cannot be separated from the researcher’s social position: who we are and how we move through the world necessarily informs our interpretations (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). A further dimension of my reflections: I am a member of the groups being studied, or was at the time (US adults 18–35 in one case, all US adults in others). More specifically, I began work on this project at age 33. I’m a White nonbinary woman from the US, a recovering news junkie, and a member of multiple personal and professional communities that take place both online and off. For example, I have multiple collaborations with colleagues I first met on Twitter, some of whom I’ve never met in person. Through the course of working on these projects, I became increasingly aware of my own news practices and those of the people around me, ranging from my family members to much more extended circles on social media. These auto-ethnographic reflections and observations are also central to the conceptual model presented here.

3. Theoretical Frameworks: Ideology, Epistemology, and Commitment

I draw heavily on theory from linguistic anthropology (the field I was trained in), bringing it into conversation with journalism studies and social media studies. In particular, my thinking relies heavily on the sociotechnical (Lewis & Westlund, 2015) and audience (Costera Meijer, 2020; Swart et al., 2022) turns in journalism and journalism studies. The sociotechnical turn has brought increased scholarly attention to knowledge production and epistemic authority (see, e.g. Carlson, 2020; Coddington, 2015; Ekström, 2002; Ekström et al., 2020; Ekström and Westlund, 2019; Godler and Reich, 2013; Lewis and Waters, 2018; Splendore, 2016). And absent the audience turn, the collaborative studies described above would never have been undertaken in the first place.

3.1. Intertextuality, Entextualization, and Recontextualization

This paper builds on the longstanding strand of linguistic anthropological research that focuses on recontextualization and circulation. These researchers ask how texts – discrete and portable excerpts of discourse – become understood as such (cf. Bucholtz, 2003: 61). This strand of research is applicable to a broad range of topics and concerns, such as learning disability diagnosis in US schools (Mehan, 1996), vendors’ calls in Mexican markets (Bauman, 2004), and ritual insults performed at Wolof weddings (Irvine, 2006). These scholars also note that some texts are more frequently reenacted across contexts than others, which can point to texts that have particular cultural importance (Silverstein and Urban, 2006: 12–14).

Across contexts, media content is particularly frequently recirculated in everyday conversation. For example, Spitulnik’s (1996) research explores how Zambians incorporate key phrases and tropes from radio announcers in everyday talk. Because awareness of these radio shows is nearly universal, these phrases are communicative resources that most Zambians can share. Where Spitulnik focused on face-to-face conversation, Squires (2014) explored vernacular writing on Twitter, yet both scholars found similar processes at work. Meanwhile, Sierra (2016, 2019) analyzed the circulation of media content within a small group of interactants who knew one another well.

All these researchers share a focus on the circulation of relatively small units of discourse. Meanwhile, the present article begins with a larger unit: full news reports. Yet this apparent difference of scale is somewhat misleading, because both highly recognizable catchphrases and full news reports are treated as self-contained and complete, ‘fashioned for ease of detachment from situational context’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990: 74).

3.2. Media Ideologies

Linguistic anthropology has also long taken an interest in local understandings of language, termed language ideologies (Silverstein, 1979). These understandings affect both language use and language structure – whether or not they are explicitly articulated (Kroskrity, 1998; 2000). Critically, these understandings are always ‘situated, partial, and interested’ (Errington, 2000). That is, they are inseparable from social positionality.

The field has since expanded beyond the purely linguistic to the semiotic writ large (e.g. Keane 2018) and to media (e.g. Gershon, 2010).3 Specifically, media ideologies are ‘how people understand both the communicative possibilities and the material limitations of a specific channel, and how they conceive of channels in general’ (Gershon, 2010: 283). In other words, media ideologies include normative judgments about what a channel is for, and not for.

The research that informs this conceptual model relied heavily on self-reports rather than observation. Observational and ethnographic studies are the best way to capture news practices, but they are often impractical (cf. Bird, 2003, 2011). However, self-report methods are ideal for capturing ideologies: these methods encourage normative rather than factive reporting. Indeed, where psychologists fret about social desirability bias in interviews and surveys, anthropologists appreciate these methods precisely for their ability to illuminate the behaviors and opinions that are considered socially desirable, which can then be compared to observed practices.

3.3. Commitment

Social media metadiscourse makes a commonsense distinction between sharing and endorsing others’ content. Thousands of Twitter profiles contain, or used to contain, some variant of the phrase ‘retweets are not endorsements.’4 As New York Times editor Patrick LaForge, one of the earliest users of this disclaimer, describes it, retweets are ‘reportage’ (Warzel, 2014).

What can this commonsense distinction tell us about media ideologies? It is especially critical when people share news, because endorsement is understood to be more socially consequential than sharing. I argue that the gap between sharing a news item and endorsing it can best be understood as a difference of stance, and particularly a difference in commitment.

Kockelman (2004: 127) differentiates between speech events (‘articulating an utterance in the world’) and commitment events (‘commit[ing] to the truth of the proposition expressed by [one’s] utterance’). These types of events are frequently indistinguishable, but there are many circumstances in which the difference is quite important. For example, a stage actor engages in speech events without any presumption that they are engaging in commitment events. However, the character that same actor embodies engages in both at once.

Reported speech and quotation function similarly: in social interaction, people frequently repeat or paraphrase what others have said without any assumption of commitment in Kockelman’s sense. More precisely, their commitment does not extend past the fact of the other person’s speech. Normatively, the same is true for journalism: journalists’ commitment ends at the act of speaking and does not extend to the context of that speech. (To give a common example, if a journalist reports that a politician said something, they are not necessarily staking a claim about what the politician said.) As Waugh (1995: 146) succinctly puts it, ‘one of the major differences between indirect speech and journalist’s reports is in terms of assertion…indirect speech is not necessarily asserted by the reporter.’

One of the strengths of this notion of commitment is Kockelman’s rejection of binary distinctions between different kinds of stance, notably affective and epistemic. Commitment can have both epistemic and affective dimensions – and these dimensions can help us make sense of news circulation practices, both online and off. Put differently, commitment is a matter of accountability. Committing to the truth of an utterance requires willingness to be held to account.

4. A Unified Model of News Sharing

Rather than differentiating by platform – for example, considering Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and conversation in isolation – I propose a model that encompasses all news recirculation, agnostic of platform or medium. Acts of sharing, in this model, vary principally in their degree of commitment to the item being shared. This model has three dimensions: publicness, ephemerality, and voice. The first two of these are primarily ideological, centering on people’s commonsense ideas about different media rather than properties inherent to the channels (Section 4.1). Only the third dimension, voice, is a question of semiotic practice (Section 4.2). Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between the dimensions.

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Open in a new tab

A three-dimensional model of news recirculation.

Commitment is not the only factor in sharing decisions. As in all social interactions, people are highly attuned to relational concerns, from identities to appropriateness. Judgments of the news report’s relevance and credibility are likely to factor in as well. However, this question of commitment, in Kockelman’s sense, is the central element that is specific practices of recirculation. In the sections that follow, I outline each dimension of the model.

4.1. Media Ideologies: Consistent Channel Preferences

In more than 20 online surveys – across story topics, presented in various formats and platforms, and using different ranking scales – respondents were most likely to say they would discuss the story with others, then that they’d share it on social media, and least likely to say they would email it (Appendix 1). The team did not ask about specific social media platforms or functions; however, open-ended responses indicate that survey-takers typically interpreted ‘social media’ to refer to less restricted forms of sharing (i.e. posts) rather than to targeted direct messages. This general ranking is also consistent with other studies: Lottridge and Bentley (2018) found that Americans had shared news more recently on social media than via private messaging, and Kalogeropoulos et al. (2017) report that people in six countries were all more likely to say they share news on social media than by email.

In addition, we always saw a larger gap between (presumably offline) conversation and social media than between social media and email. In many cases, willingness to email and share on social media were not meaningfully different – while the difference between conversation and the other two nearly always was. The robustness of this pattern suggests that, at least from a normative perspective, people are much more comfortable talking about news reports than they are sharing them on social media or by email.

In open-ended responses and focus group conversations, participants provided two primary reasons for discussing news reports. First, many people said they discussed news with people for whom it had some clear relevance (compare Barchas-Lichtenstein et al., 2021) or who might want to act on that news. They planned to discuss a story about the dangers of vaping with a family member who vaped, or pass on a story about asbestos to a neighbor who worked in construction and was particularly likely to be exposed. Second, they discussed news as a form of phatic communication. That is, it provided fodder for conversation within close relationships. For example, one person said they would tell their wife ‘just for general banter about health topics.’5

These logics of sharing echo those that other researchers have found both online and off, in the US (Bigman et al., 2019; Holton et al., 2014; Lottridge and Bentley, 2018) and elsewhere (Duffy & Ling, 2020; Kümpel et al., 2015; Picone et al., 2016; Swart et al., 2019). All of these researchers highlight the importance of social motivations for recirculating news. These logics also begin to explain the preference for talking about stories over the other options we provided, particularly in the context of two widespread sets of media ideologies: publicness and ephemerality.

4.1.1. Public and Private

Research participants often framed comments about overall sharing habits in terms of their ‘public’ and ‘private; behavior. Others said that they only use social media for ‘personal’ news. Such comments almost always assumed shared definitions of these realms.

Susan Gal (2002; 2005) observes that the public/private distinction is far from natural – yet it is infrequently viewed critically. As she reminds us, different language ideologies locate the boundary differently. In the US, public and private are typically understood as spatial. In Communist-era Eastern Europe, they were primarily seen as features of kinds of people. Both metaphors inform widely shared ideologies about the publicness of particular communicative channels.

Many online spaces are understood as blurring the distinction between private and public (Johansson, 2017). Androutsopoulos (2014: 71) suggests that ‘a tension between intimacy and publicness’ is a feature of social media conversation. Marwick and boyd (2011) deemed this challenge ‘context collapse,’ where social media users ‘must contend with groups of people they do not normally bring together, such as acquaintances, friends, co-workers, and family’ (p.122). Yet context collapse is not inherent in the technology; it is, instead, the result of normative Anglo-American usages of said technology (Costa, 2018). Furthermore, this tension exists across communicative acts, whether online or off. Androutsopoulos himself (2014) provides the example of wedding toasts, in which speakers must negotiate a similarly heterogeneous audience (but see Costa, 2018).

Previous research has shown that people who comment on news stories online imagine their audience differently in different spaces. On Facebook, they are much more likely to understand their audience as consisting of friends and family members, while in comment sections on news websites they see themselves as writing not just for other users of the same content but for the journalists who produced it and even for politicians who may be positioned to act on it (Kim et al., 2018). But this type of public commentary is hardly new: letters to the editor are as old as the modern newspaper.

All the same, many scholars treat publicness as inherent in platforms. For example, Lottridge and Bentley (2018) characterize direct messages as private, whereas Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are personal social media, and Twitter and Reddit are public. Similarly, Kalsnes and Larsson (2018) write that Twitter is used for news while Facebook is used socially. Other researchers locate publicness in individuals rather than in spaces. For example, some guides to the ethics of internet research (e.g. Townsend and Wallace, 2016; Williams et al., 2017) naturalize the categories of ‘public figures’ and ‘private individuals,’ arguing that researchers have different ethical obligations to these types of person.

Yet relatively early research highlights that publicness is an ideological construction rather than a technological fact: Hermida et al. (2012) found that Canadians preferred news links from family and friends to those from journalists, on both Facebook and Twitter – although they noted, perhaps presciently, that ‘this may change as people become more used to the idea of “liking” a news organization on Facebook or following a journalist on Twitter’ (p. 821). And Marwick and boyd (2011) note that ‘[p]eople with few followers, who use the site for reasons other than self-promotion, generally see Twitter as a personal space’ (p. 124). More recently, a survey of 368 Twitter users found that most are not fully aware of the implications of tweeting publicly (Fiesler and Proferes, 2017). For example, many believe that their public Tweets are their intellectual property, despite Twitter’s Terms of Service, which grant explicit permission to researchers to use them. Importantly, some of their survey responses suggest non-binary understandings of public and private contexts.

It’s almost certain that the affordances-in-practice (Costa, 2018) of various channels contribute to these ideological perceptions. One knows precisely who is in hearing range during an in-person conversation. Meanwhile, emails – and other private messages – are directed to a specific person or group of people, but they can be forwarded. And different social media platforms have different features that contribute to these ideologies. For example, the fact that ties on Facebook are reciprocal by default may lead to a sense that it is somewhat less public than a platform like Twitter, where following is a unidirectional relationship. Similarly, some platforms allow users to customize visibility to specific individuals, while others require posts be shared to all followers or even the public.6

Sharing news in a context understood to be more private lessens the commitment because the sharer believes they have more control over their audience – and thus a better understanding of who they may be accountable to. The larger the audience, too, the more possibilities for misalignment between imagined and actual audience (cf. Litt, 2012) – and for accountability.

4.1.2. Ephemerality

Individuals also understand communicative acts on a scale from fully ephemeral to fully permanent, even archival. In popular understanding, ephemerality is a straightforward property of channels, but in truth the materiality of channels always allows for multiple possibilities (Gershon, 2017). For example, writing is both ‘persistent’ and ‘perishable,’ ‘both durable and potentially destructible’ (Keane, 2013: 2). Similarly, a throwaway remark about a news report in conversation is perceived as ephemeral, whereas referring to that same news report in a public lecture may be understood to have more lasting impact, although the act of speaking is equally short-lived.

As with publicness, multiple features of various channels contribute to widely shared perceptions of ephemerality. The act of speaking is transitory, whereas anyone working in an office has received repeated cautions that ‘email is forever.’ Different social media and messaging platforms offer a range of possibilities. Some platforms only allow content to be accessible for a specific limited amount of time. Yet that feature is no guarantee of ephemerality: screenshots can and do circulate after such posts have expired. Some platforms have poor searching or archiving features, which effectively relegates old content to the garbage heap.

Sharing news in a context understood to be more ephemeral also lessens the commitment of sharing. If the act of sharing is less likely to resurface later – or rather, if the sharer imagines it to be less likely to resurface later – that creates fewer opportunities for others to use the act to hold the sharer accountable.7

4.2. Semiotic Practices: Voice

But sharing news does not require commitment, accountability to the factuality of what is shared. Consider the proliferation of #FixedIt posts on Twitter, which critique media coverage. The canonical example displays a screenshot of a headline or news story, with edits in red; others use visual layout to make their critique clear (See Figure 2). These posts – which fall into a category that Carlson (2016) describes as ‘mundane media criticism’ – often call attention to framing that is racist, sexist, ableist, and so on. In doing so, the sharer actively disavows commitment.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Open in a new tab

Tweet critiquing news headline.

Yet this genre also sheds light on norms of news sharing: in the absence of a clearly communicated alternative stance, epistemic commitment is typically taken as a default. If someone shares a news story with me, whether at the dinner table or on the Internet, I will assume they believe that the events in question occurred – unless they say otherwise.

As Carlson (2020) notes, sharers sometimes provide additional commentary. I understand this commentary as voice: the degree to which the action is understood as replicating or responding to (cf. Bauman, 2004; Urban, 1996) an earlier communication, in this case the news story. For Bauman (2004: 129) replication refers to ‘the reproduction of an instance of discourse in a new context, in a relationship of copy to original.’ As he observes, replication need not actually be verbatim to be understood as such by participants. Meanwhile, a response reacts to the original rather than purporting to copy it.8 In the case of news re-circulation, mentioning a story without comment or sharing it on social media without any additional framing amounts to replication; any sort of explicit stance-taking is a response.

An act of replication – be it telling a colleague about the story you saw this morning or reposting an article on Facebook without comment – is unmarked. This unmarked form of recirculation remains a commitment event because journalism maintains a normative epistemic status, despite growing disagreement about which outlets are credible. Acts of response, on the other hand, can explicitly modulate commitment, either deepening or rejecting it.

4.2.1. Replication and Stance

News sharing is embedded in broader communicative and conversational histories. Consider two vignettes of replicative news sharing, both from February 2021:

In a video call, several collaborators and I were discussing the best way to approach an equity issue. In response to the conversation, I asked if any of my colleagues had seen recent news coverage about unforeseen consequences of an approach related to the one we were considering. They had not, so I quickly summarized and asked if those concerns were likely to be relevant in our context.

While my partner and I were staying with my in-laws in Illinois, I was complaining about the politics of criminal justice in our home state. ‘Look what happened here today,’ he said, showing me a headline about the elimination of cash bail in Illinois.

Neither I nor my partner expressed an overt affective stance towards the news we shared, yet in both cases our stances could be (and were) clearly inferred by our conversational partners.9 My colleagues interpreted my explanation as commitment to the fact that those consequences had occurred, and as a desire to avoid them. I’ve had many long conversations with my partner about politics, so I knew he considered this story a piece of good news. And so on.

Even when the news story is shared in a conversational ‘first position’ – a text message out of the blue, a clear topic shift at the dinner table – it remains embedded in these histories. Not only does my father catch me up on the news every time we talk, he also sends me a constant stream of news links by email and text message. Some of these go to me alone, and some to a broader set of people. In a single month (February 2021) these included: a New York Times link about SoulCycle, a New Yorker piece about Marjorie Taylor Greene, a CNN piece about vaccine safety, and a restaurant review. Even when he sends nothing but a bare URL, I can almost always infer both his interest in the story – and what he thinks mine will be. But I do not question his commitment to its factuality unless he says so outright.

Likewise, survey respondents expressed stance towards the news stories in a variety of ways when asked how they would talk about them offline. Some respondents interpreted the how question as an opportunity to repeat facts they learned from watching the video, as in Excerpt 1.

Excerpt 1:

In February 2019, this respondent watched a video about acute flaccid myelitis, a neurological condition that affects children.10

1 S: You said you were at least somewhat likely to describe
2 this story. Who are you likely to describe it to?
3 R: To my family members that have small children.
4 S: How would you describe it?
5 R: That there’s a rare illness that is causing children
6 to became paralyzed and could kill them, but doctors
7 don’t know what causes it. I would give them the facts
8 that I learned from the video.
9 S: Why would you describe it?
10 R: I would describe it because it’s important information
11 for parents to know and what to look out for if their
12 children experience symptoms.
Open in a new tab

By treating the story primarily as a set of facts to be repeated (lines 5–8), this respondent focuses on its context-independence, which Urban (1996) identifies as a feature of replication. Similarly, a number of respondents interpreted how as an almost mechanical question, providing logistical details. For example, one person wrote, ‘I’m going to fucking bring the clip up on youtube and make [my wife] watch it.’

Arguably, news stories are highly replicable as a genre. They appear self-contained – particularly online, where single segments within a longer show are often available as discrete videos – in keeping with Urban’s (1996: 42) observation that the originators of a text can build in entextualizing cues that encourage particular reuses.

4.2.2. Acts of Response

All the same, many other respondents treated how as a question about conversational context or stance towards the reported facts. These respondents did not typically indicate whether they would ask their conversation partner to watch or read the story, but focused instead on their interpretation of its relevance, which often included an evaluation (Excerpt 2). That is, they provided a response.

Excerpt 2:

In April 2020, this respondent watched a video about Taiwan’s COVID-19 response.

1 S: You said you were at least somewhat likely to describe
2 this story. Who are you likely to describe it to?
3 R: My Dad, my boyfriend, and some friends.
4 S: How would you describe it?
5 R: I would say it’s embarrassing how terrible we have
6 handled this in comparison to countries like Taiwan
7 who responded immediately and appropriately. They are
8 supporting their citizens. We are not.
9 S: Why would you describe it?
10 R: It’s important for anyone to understand how this could
11 have been dealt with differently to prepare us for
12 another pandemic in the future.
Open in a new tab

This respondent indicates that they would tell at least three distinct individuals about the story (line 3) before drawing a distinction between we (lines 5, 8, 11) and they (line 7). They refers to countries like Taiwan (line 6), indicating that we is the US, which the respondent never names. The respondent also provides an explicit evaluation of the reported facts (immediately and appropriately, line 7) that contrasts with their evaluation of their own experience (embarrassing, how terrible we have handled this, lines 5–6).

4.2.3. Extended Quotation: Replication as Naturalizing

Some scholars (e.g. Haapanen and Perrin, 2018; Puschmann, 2015) treat all social media sharing as a form of quotation. Puschmann (2015: 30) differentiates the functions of quoting on- and offline, arguing that quotation is informational and argumentative in formal print genres, while social media sharing is primarily to inscribe relationships (compare Duffy & Ling, 2020). Other scholars’ versions center the complexities of process: quoting is ‘the purpose-oriented recontextualization of a stretch of prior discourse while marking it in an appropriate way as a quote’ (Haapanen and Perrin, 2018). This definition aligns closely with replication: what matters most is not the verbatim reproduction of prior speech (cf. Inoue, 2018) but rather a shared orientation to its status as a copy. Of course, many acts of social media sharing are clearly responses and not replications. On a daily basis, I see news reports shared with personal reflections, with pleas to take some particular action, and with extensive commentary on the facts being reported. The news article is only part of this larger communication, which contextualizes it.

Yet I was first inspired to write this piece when I recognized a pattern: I often quote at length from a news report I am sharing on social media (typically Twitter or Facebook). Many friends, family members, and people I follow do it too. Often it’s to highlight a particularly well-worded point in an opinion piece (compare Figure 3). I’ve seen others do something similar – often with additional commentary or orthographic highlighting – to call attention to a telling or egregious detail, and Jessica Robles (pers. comm.) notes that some people use quotation to challenge something they see as self-evidently false.

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Open in a new tab

Extended quotation from linked piece in tweet.

This social media practice of extended quotation replicates a short piece of the text. Pull quotes in a newspaper function similarly: they draw the eye and help the reader process important information. Readers may also focus overly on pull quotes in interpretation due to their perceptual salience: One study found that readers were more likely to agree with arguments put forward in pull quotes, even if the article as a whole was balanced (Gibson et al., 2001).

And this highlights a key aspect of replicative practices: they are naturalizing moves. People use them to suggest that the text speaks for itself – even while simultaneously staking claims about which aspect of the text matters most, or about the text’s meaning. In short, replications allow commitment to remain ‘off-record,’ thereby lessening accountability. Yet some level of accountability remains the default. By virtue of recirculating news content in a marked way, responses provide opportunities either to disavow that commitment or to make it explicit.

5. Discussion & Conclusion

Institutional texts such as news media make dominant ideologies come to seem ‘only natural’ (e.g. Fairclough 1985, van Dijk 2009). In this paper, I’ve argued that people’s off- and on-line recirculation practices allow them to further naturalize those institutional voices and ideologies, even as they modulate their own accountability for what they share.

Journalism studies increasingly concerns itself with news users’ role in the (re)distribution of news. Given the separation of publication from distribution, which has come with the rise of platform companies, Ekström and Westlund (2019) term this shift displacement and identify a number of consequences. For example, as truth claims are re-fashioned in social media, segments from the sound bite to the entire story are decontextualized and recontextualized. These recontextualizations may erase key markers of truth claims, from the news organization’s brand to ways of designating different news genres, such as editorial and analysis.

Bringing news users more fully into this line of inquiry, Carlson (2016; 2020) argues that it is impossible to understand journalistic epistemology without bringing in contexts of circulation. For Carlson, circulation encompasses three key elements: infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests. By infrastructure, he refers to the materiality of circulation, which encompasses everything from the format and packaging of news stories to the algorithms and metrics that underlie much of what users see, and even the hardware and software people use to both create and access news. Circulation practices, meanwhile, are social, and encompass the actions of journalists, news users, and other intermediaries like news aggregators and social media platforms, all of which ‘affect how news moves about and what its meanings are’ (Carlson, 2020: 238). Finally, epistemic contests refer to conflicts between different logics of knowing and knowledge production. (For example, Carlson points to politically motivated criticism of news media.) I build on this work by expanding the study of circulation practices beyond the digital, including their inextricable linkage with epistemic contests.

5.1. The Value of ‘Commitment’

The term ‘social media’ is ubiquitous in the literature on journalistic re-circulation. A number of scholarly definitions are in wide circulation (see Aichner et al., 2021 for a review), with some slippage between ‘social networking sites’ (e.g. boyd & Ellison, 2007) and ‘social media’ more broadly (Kaplan & Haenlain, 2010). Regardless of the definition used, the focus on social media sharing – as opposed to sharing practices more broadly – in journalism and journalism studies is likely related to the ever-increasing emphasis on metrics (compare Petre, 2015). Both the pressures exerted by “quantified audiences” (Anderson, 2011) and the relative ease of measuring them are seductive.

Laying out a vision for a new and truly audience-centric vision of research, Swart et al. (2022) argue that the field must take seriously “practices and news users that are not as self-evidently relevant or valuable to news media.” The model I offer in this paper provides one inroad to doing just that. Grounding news sharing in commitment allows us to think beyond the audience practices we can most easily quantify, and to explore the epistemic contests that take place beyond the digital.

In fact, functional definitions that do not explicitly limit social media to the internet (e.g. Kietzmann et al., 2011) point the way here. If we focus on the functions of social media, we can make a case for all kinds of additional contexts: the zine distribution shelf at a local bookstore, the community bulletin board in the laundromat, and the open-mic night at a café all support ‘the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (Kaplan & Haenlain, 2010). The unified model presented in this paper offers an opportunity to identify the similarities in news users’ practices across contexts, as well as what makes each context unique.

5.2. The Urgency of Moving Past Platform-Centricity

Not only is this work theoretically and empirically valuable to journalism studies; it is also extremely timely. Carr and Hayes (2015) outline the hazards of techno-centric and platform-centric approaches to ‘social media’, which leave scholars theoretically unprepared for even short-term technology developments. As I revise this paper in early November 2022, Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter has made the need to move away from this approach only more urgent. Whether you think about Twitter primarily as a particular assemblage of features and affordances-in-practice (Costa, 2018), a massive collection of people with primarily loose ties, or a corporation with thousands of employees, it has changed considerably in recent weeks and that pace of change looks likely to continue for some time. Any scholarly work about Twitter that does not specify conditions on the ground at the time of data collection and writing will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to interpret in the future. Moreover, the vast array of alternatives to which active Twitter users are jumping ship (among them Mastodon, Discord, Cohost, and Reddit) only illustrates the futility of platform-centricity: only a model which can accommodate all of them and situated them in wider practice will allow for comparison.

Acknowledgments

Arrianna Marie Planey, Lavanya Murali, and John Voiklis talked through aspects of the argument with me. Magnus Pharao Hansen, Jessica Robles, and Susan Blum read various in-progress drafts and provided useful comments. Josh Raclaw and Abby Bajuniemi first called my attention to the richness of the excerpts towards the end of this paper; the brief discussion found here is much-abridged from a version first presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. All these scholars have helped me sharpen my thinking around these questions. I’m also grateful to Arrianna Marie Planey for allowing me to use one of her tweets as an example (the other is my own), and too many colleagues to count at Knology and PBS NewsHour, especially Patti Parson, Laura Santhanam, and John Voiklis for our ongoing conversations about news practices. Finally, I think the editor and the anonymous reviewers who made this a much stronger piece.

Funding Statement

The data discussed in this paper were collected with support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 15163471 and 1906802, and the National Institutes of Health under Grant No. #1R25OD0202212-01A1. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.

Appendix 1.

Self-reported likelihood to share news stories via three channels.

Story topic (and platform) N Email Social media Describe
Antibiotics (Broadcast) 98 2.80 3.19 3.93
Dogs (Broadcast) 98 2.81 3.18 3.79
Dentist (Broadcast) 98 2.61 2.83 3.93
Influenza (Broadcast) 101 2.35 2.64 3.31
Fires (Broadcast) 100 2.28 2.62 3.62
Pregnancy (Broadcast) 100 2.26 2.36 3.32
New Year (Article) 98 2.54 2.62 3.52
AFM (Broadcast) 100 2.32 2.72 3.66
Viruses (Article & Web Video) 99 2.44 2.86 3.6
Asbestos (Broadcast) 96 2.66 2.9 3.88
Alzheimer’s (Broadcast) 101 2.66 2.62 4.01
Vaping (Broadcast) 100 2.47 2.67 3.99
COVID in Taiwan (Broadcast) 99 2.65 2.66 4.16
Precision Medicine (Broadcast) 99 2.50 2.53 3.99
Ocean Trash 195 - 3.13 3.55
 Facebook 67 - 3.45 3.59
 Broadcast 64 - 3.14 3.81
 Twitter 64 - 2.80 3.25
TRAPPIST 150 - 3.12 3.69
 Article 50 - 2.9 3.6
 Broadcast 50 - 3.36 3.64
 Tumblr 50 - 3.1 3.82
Lionfish 100 2.72 2.94 3.83
 Broadcast 50 2.42 2.64 3.7
 Infographic 50 3.02 3.24 3.96
Hologram 100 2.3 2.59 3.42
 Article 50 2.06 2.44 3.38
 Facebook 50 2.54 2.74 3.46
Ice Shelf 100 2.56 2.75 3.66
 Broadcast 50 2.56 2.6 3.84
 Facebook 50 2.56 2.9 3.48
Tornadoes 99 2.39 2.51 3.03
 Article 49 2.41 2.53 3.04
 Facebook 50 2.38 2.48 3.02
Dolphins (3 Broadcast versions) 301 2.48 2.70 3.55
Lyme 303 2.54 2.68 3.44
 Article 100 2.47 2.55 3.34
 Broadcast 102 2.41 2.63 3.41
 FB Live 102 2.71 2.84 3.52
Opioids 195 3.14 3.30 3.59
 Article 49 3.08 3.27 3.80
 Broadcast 47 3.11 3.51 3.74
 Explainer 47 3.23 3.47 3.83
 Storified Twitter chat 52 3.29 3.33 3.79
Open in a new tab

Notes. All responses are presented on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Respondents originally moved a slider between −1 and +1 on several surveys; these results were mathematically transformed for comparability

Footnotes

1

Of course, many technical elements – including not just algorithms but older technologies like page layouts and television schedules – affect what we see and thus what we choose to share. However, this paper focuses on practices, what people do. Compare Carlson (2016, p. 918), who argues for the need to treat news sharing ‘as a cultural practice–that is, as contextualized, patterned action with interpretive consequences.’

2

News user activities that most directly inform this conceptual model include a series of 23 surveys (N = approx. 2,900) and 10 focus groups (N = approx. 60). We asked respondents in all surveys to indicate their interest in sharing a particular news story on social media, emailing that story, and describing it to someone. One series of surveys included an open-ended item asking participants to characterize their sharing habits in general, while another included open-ended follow-up items about conversations, which were only asked of those who said they were at least somewhat likely to share in conversation. Focus group questions focused on general news sharing habits, as well as interest in sharing or discussing particular news reports. All research activities were approved by Solutions IRB under protocol numbers 2016–07-17 and 2016–03-7 and/or TERC IRB under protocols number 55706 and KN9002.

3

As both Thurlow (2017) and Gershon (2010) note, the distinction between language ideologies, semiotic ideologies, and media ideologies is chiefly analytical, and the boundaries are by no means crisp.

4

This distinction does not hold up legally (Borchers, 2017).

5

These conclusions are quite similar to those drawn by Duffy and Ling (2020), which we became aware of after completing the study.

6

See Litt (2012: 337), for an extended discussion of the features of particular sites at a particular moment in time.

7

Consider the discursive practice of ‘showing receipts,’ among other accountability practices that originated in Black Twitter (Brock, 2020; Clark 2015, 2020).

8

Both replication and response – and in fact all social media sharing – are forms of re-entextualization, ‘the process by means of which a piece of ‘text’ … is extracted from its original context-of-use and re-inserted into an entirely different one, involving different participation frameworks, a different kind of textuality, … and ultimately also very different meaning outcomes’ (Varis and Blommaert, 2014: 8; see also Carlson, 2016).

9

I am indebted to Magnus Pharao Hansen for this point.

10

All excerpts come from online surveys; I treat them here as interactions to highlight their dialogic nature (cf. Raclaw et al., 2020)

References

  1. Aichner T, Grünfelder M, Maurer O, & Jegeni D (2021). Twenty-Five Years of Social Media: A Review of Social Media Applications and Definitions from 1994 to 2019. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 24(4), 215–222. 10.1089/cyber.2020.0134 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Anderson C (2011). Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms. Journalism, 12(5), 550–566. 10.1177/1464884911402451 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  3. Androutsopoulos J (2014). Languaging when contexts collapse: Audience design in social networking. Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5, 62–73. [Google Scholar]
  4. Barchas-Lichtenstein J, Fraser J, Parson P, Norlander RJ, Griffin J, Akpan N, Daub T, Marder J, Raine C, Roberts S-J, Boulter M, Carey T, Dennis V, Hendry E, Hugo K, Khan S, Kocak I, Santhanam L, Shivni R, Strum L, Tiffany LA, & Wagner A (2020). Negotiating Genre and New Media for STEM News. Journalism Practice, 14(6), 643–663. [Google Scholar]
  5. Barchas-Lichtenstein J, Voiklis J, Glasser DB, & Fraser J (2021). Finding relevance in the news: The scale of self-reference. Journal of Pragmatics, 171, 49–61. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  6. Bauman R (2004). A world of others’ words: Cross-cultural perspectives on intertextuality. Blackwell. [Google Scholar]
  7. Bauman R, & Briggs CL (1990). Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 59–88. [Google Scholar]
  8. Bigman CA, Smith MA, Williamson LD, Planey AM, & Smith SM (2019). Selective sharing on social media: Examining the effects of disparate racial impact frames on intentions to retransmit news stories among US college students. New Media & Society, 21(11–12), 2691–2709. [Google Scholar]
  9. Bird SE (2003). The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. Routledge. [Google Scholar]
  10. Bird SE (2011). Seeking the Audience for News: Response, News Talk, and Everyday Practices. In Nightingale V (Ed.), The Handbook of Media Audiences (pp. 489–508). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [Google Scholar]
  11. Borchers C (2017, Oct. 4). “Retweets ≠ endorsements? Oh, yes, they do, say the Hatch Act police.” The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/10/04/retweets-endorsements-hatch-act/ [Google Scholar]
  12. boyd d. m., & Ellison NB (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  13. Brock A Jr (2020), Distributed Blackness: African-American Cybercultures. NYU Press. [Google Scholar]
  14. Bucholtz M (2003). Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender: Discourse Analysis in Language and Gender Studies. In Holmes J & Meyerhoff M (Eds.), The Handbook of Language and Gender (pp. 43–68). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [Google Scholar]
  15. Carlson M (2016). Embedded Links, Embedded Meanings. Journalism Studies, 17(7), 915–924. [Google Scholar]
  16. Carlson M (2020). Journalistic epistemology and digital news circulation: Infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests. New Media & Society, 22(2), 230–246. [Google Scholar]
  17. Carr CT, & Hayes RA (2015). Social media: Defining, developing, and divining. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 23(1), 46–65. [Google Scholar]
  18. Clark MD (2015). Black Twitter: Building connection through cultural conversation. In Rambukkana N (Ed.), Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks. Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]
  19. Clark MD (2020). DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture.” Communication and the Public, 5(3–4), 88–92. [Google Scholar]
  20. Coddington M (2015). Clarifying Journalism’s Quantitative Turn. Digital Journalism, 3(3), 331–348. [Google Scholar]
  21. Costa E (2018). Affordances-in-practice: An ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse. New Media & Society, 20(10), 3641–3656. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  22. Costera Meijer I (2020). Understanding the Audience Turn in Journalism: From Quality Discourse to Innovation Discourse as Anchoring Practices 1995–2020. Journalism Studies 21(16), .2325–2342. [Google Scholar]
  23. Costera Meijer I, & Groot Kormelink T (2015). Checking, Sharing, Clicking and Linking: Changing patterns of news use between 2004 and 2014. Digital Journalism, 3(5), 664–679. [Google Scholar]
  24. Duffy A, & Ling R (2020). The Gift of News: Phatic News Sharing on Social Media for Social Cohesion. Journalism Studies, 21(1), 72–87. [Google Scholar]
  25. Ekström M (2002). Epistemologies of TV journalism: A theoretical framework. Journalism, 3(3), 259–282. [Google Scholar]
  26. Ekström M, Lewis SC, & Westlund O (2020). Epistemologies of digital journalism and the study of misinformation. New Media & Society, 22(2), 205–212. [Google Scholar]
  27. Ekström M, & Westlund O (2019). The Dislocation of News Journalism: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Epistemologies of Digital Journalism. Media and Communication, 7(1), 259–270. [Google Scholar]
  28. Engelke M (2018). How to Think Like an Anthropologist. Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
  29. Errington J (1999). Ideology. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9(1/2), 115–117. [Google Scholar]
  30. Fairclough NL (1985). Critical and descriptive goals in discourse analysis. Journal of Pragmatics, 9(6), 739–763. [Google Scholar]
  31. Fiesler C, & Proferes N (2018). “Participant” Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics. Social Media + Society, 4(1), 2056305118763366. [Google Scholar]
  32. Gal S (2002). A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(1), 77–95. [Google Scholar]
  33. Gal S (2005). Language Ideologies Compared. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 23–37. [Google Scholar]
  34. Gershon I (2010). Media Ideologies: An Introduction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(2), 283–293. [Google Scholar]
  35. Gershon I (2017). Language and the Newness of Media. Annual Review of Anthropology, 46(1), 15–31. [Google Scholar]
  36. Gibson JJ (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press. [Google Scholar]
  37. Gibson R, Hester JB, & Stewart S (2001). Pull Quotes Shape Reader Perceptions of News Stories. Newspaper Research Journal, 22(2), 66–78. [Google Scholar]
  38. Godler Y, & Reich Z (2013). How Journalists Think About Facts. Journalism Studies, 14(1), 94–112. [Google Scholar]
  39. Haapanen L, & Perrin D (2018). Media and Quoting. In Cotter C & Perrin D (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media. Routledge. [Google Scholar]
  40. Heikkilä H, & Ahva L (2015). The Relevance of Journalism: Studying News Audiences in a Digital Era. Journalism Practice, 9(1), 50–64. [Google Scholar]
  41. Hermida A, Fletcher F, Korell D, & Logan D (2012). Share, Like, Recommend. Journalism Studies, 13(5–6), 815–824. [Google Scholar]
  42. Holton AE, Baek K, Coddington M, & Yaschur C (2014). Seeking and Sharing: Motivations for Linking on Twitter. Communication Research Reports, 31(1), 33–40. [Google Scholar]
  43. Inoue M (2018). Word for Word: Verbatim as Political Technologies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47(1), 217–232. [Google Scholar]
  44. Irvine JT (1996). Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles. In Silverstein M & Urban G (Eds.), Natural Histories of Discourse (pp. 131–159). University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
  45. Johansson M (2017). Everyday opinions in news discussion forums: Public vernacular discourse. Discourse, Context & Media, 19, 5–12. [Google Scholar]
  46. Kalogeropoulos A, Negredo S, Picone I, & Nielsen RK (2017). Who Shares and Comments on News?: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation. Social Media + Society, 3(4), 205630511773575. [Google Scholar]
  47. Kaplan AM, & Haenlein M (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68. 10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  48. Keane W (2013). On spirit writing: Materialities of language and the religious work of transduction. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 1–17. [Google Scholar]
  49. Keane W (2018). On Semiotic Ideology. Signs and Society, 6(1): 64–87. [Google Scholar]
  50. Kietzmann JH, Hermkens K, McCarthy IP, & Silvestre BS (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241–251. 10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  51. Kockelman P (2004). Stance and Subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(2), 127–150. [Google Scholar]
  52. Kroskrity PV (1998). Arizona Tewa Kiva Speech as a Manifestation of a Dominant Language Ideology. In Schieffelin BB, Woolard KA, & Kroskrity PV (Eds.), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (pp. 103–122). Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
  53. Kroskrity PV (2000). Regimenting Languages: Language Ideological Perspectives. In Kroskrity PV (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (pp. 1–34). School for Advanced Research Press. [Google Scholar]
  54. Kümpel AS, Karnowski V, & Keyling T (2015). News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks. Social Media + Society, 1(2), 2056305115610141. [Google Scholar]
  55. Lange PG (2018). Sharing in the digital era: Histories and consequences. Media, Culture & Society, 40(7), 1101–1106. [Google Scholar]
  56. Lewis NP, & Waters S (2018). Data Journalism and the Challenge of Shoe-Leather Epistemologies. Digital Journalism, 6(6), 719–736. [Google Scholar]
  57. Lewis SC, & Westlund O (2015). Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work. Digital Journalism, 3(1), 19–37. [Google Scholar]
  58. Litt E (2012). Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 330–345. [Google Scholar]
  59. Lottridge D, & Bentley FR (2018). Let’s Hate Together: How People Share News in Messaging, Social, and Public Networks. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. [Google Scholar]
  60. Madianou M, & Miller D (2013). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2), 169–187. [Google Scholar]
  61. Manning P, & Gershon I (2013). Animating interaction. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3), 107–137. [Google Scholar]
  62. Marwick AE, & boyd d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. [Google Scholar]
  63. Mauthner NS, & Doucet A (2003). Reflexive Accounts and Accounts of Reflexivity in Qualitative Data Analysis. Sociology, 37(3), 413–431. [Google Scholar]
  64. Mehan H (1996). The construction of an LD student: A case study in the politics of representation. In Silverstein M & Urban G (Eds.), Natural Histories of Discourse (pp. 253–276). University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
  65. Petre C (2015). The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times. Tow Center for Digital Journalism. [Google Scholar]
  66. Picone I, De Wolf R, & Robijt S (2016). Who Shares What with Whom and Why? Digital Journalism, 4(7), 921–932. [Google Scholar]
  67. Puschmann C (2015). The form and function of quoting in digital media. Discourse, Context & Media, 7, 28–36. [Google Scholar]
  68. Raclaw J, Barchas-Lichtenstein J, & Bajuniemi A (2020). Online surveys as discourse context: Response practices and recipient design. Discourse, Context & Media, 38, 100441. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  69. Sierra S (2016). Playing out loud: Videogame references as resources in friend interaction for managing frames, epistemics, and group identity. Language in Society, 45(2), 217–245. [Google Scholar]
  70. Sierra S (2019). Linguistic and ethnic media stereotypes in everyday talk: Humor and identity construction among friends. Journal of Pragmatics, 152, 186–199. [Google Scholar]
  71. Silverstein M (1979). Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In Clyne PR, Hanks WF, & Hofbauer CL (Eds.), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels (pp. 193–257). Chicago Linguistic Society. [Google Scholar]
  72. Silverstein M, & Urban G (1996). The Natural History of Discourse. In Natural Histories of Discourse (pp. 1–17). University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
  73. Southwell BG, & Torres A (2006). Connecting Interpersonal and Mass Communication: Science News Exposure, Perceived Ability to Understand Science, and Conversation. Communication Monographs, 73(3), 334–350. [Google Scholar]
  74. Spitulnik D (1996). The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 6(2), 161–187. [Google Scholar]
  75. Splendore S (2016). Quantitatively Oriented Forms of Journalism and Their Epistemology. Sociology Compass, 10(5), 343–352. [Google Scholar]
  76. Squires L (2014). From TV Personality to Fans and Beyond: Indexical Bleaching and the Diffusion of a Media Innovation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 24(1), 42–62. [Google Scholar]
  77. Swart J, Peters C, & Broersma M (2019). Sharing and Discussing News in Private Social Media Groups. Digital Journalism, 7(2), 187–205. [Google Scholar]
  78. Swart J, Groot Kormelink T, Costera Meijer I, & Broersma M (2022). Advancing a Radical Audience Turn in Journalism. Fundamental Dilemmas for Journalism Studies. Digital Journalism, 10(1), 8–22. 10.1080/21670811.2021.2024764 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  79. Thurlow C (2017). “Forget about the words”? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse: The case of sexting. Discourse, Context & Media, 20, 10–19. [Google Scholar]
  80. Townsend L, & Wallace C (2016). Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics. University of Aberdeen. [Google Scholar]
  81. Urban G (1996). Entextualization, Replication, and Power. In Silverstein M & Urban G (Eds.), Natural Histories of Discourse (pp. 21–44). University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
  82. van Dijk TA (2009). News, Discourse, and Ideology. In Wahl-Jorgensen K & Hanitzsch T (Eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies (pp. 191–204). Routledge. [Google Scholar]
  83. Varis P, & Blommaert J (2015). Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures. Multilingual Margins, 2(1), 31–45. [Google Scholar]
  84. Warzel C (2014, April 15). “Meet the man behind Twitter’s most infamous phrase.” BuzzFeed News. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/meet-theman-behind-twitters-most-infamous-phrase [Google Scholar]
  85. Waugh LR (1995). Reported speech in journalistic discourse: The relation of function and text. Text & Talk, 15(1), 129–173. [Google Scholar]
  86. Weeks BE, & Holbert RL (2013). Predicting Dissemination of News Content in Social Media: A Focus on Reception, Friending, and Partisanship. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 90(2), 212–232. [Google Scholar]
  87. Williams ML, Burnap P, & Sloan L (2017). Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research: Taking into Account Users’ Views, Online Context and Algorithmic Estimation. Sociology, 51(6), 1149–1168. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

RESOURCES