Language and Media

Social networking, microblogging, and content-sharing platforms are a mainstay of contemporary information flow yet offer and indeed require new ways of using language, approaching textual identity, and modeling author-reader relationships. In this course we will establish which innovations are truly novel, which may endure, and how human language may be changing. We will first examine public discourse about new media for insights into social beliefs about innovation, youth, and authority. After learning a suite of tools from contemporary sociolinguistics, we will conduct student-originated research on language phenomena of interest in new media. (This course counts as an elective towards the minor in Linguistics)