Discourse Community Essay on Instagram

Introduction

Media has become an inseparable part of everyone’s life and that makes genre analysis in media discourse even more worthwhile. The topic of this essay is genre analysis in media discourse and is based on Machin and Van Leeuwen’s article (2014). I will focus on the multimodal social media discourse and more specifically on Instagram discourse. After discussing the above-mentioned article, the characteristics of media discourse, and the multimodality of this genre I will apply this theory to an Instagram example.

Machin and Van Leeuwen’s genre analysis in media discourse.

In their article “Genre Analysis in media discourse” Machin and Van Leeuwen define genres as “kinds of communicative acts” that encrypt specific kinds of interaction and relationships between the participants. But, according to them, genres are not simply “communicative acts”, but are defined by the type of communication encrypted in them, as well as the social relations they reflect; they also consist of multiple stages, each serving a specific communication function. (Machin & T, 2014, p. 172-173)

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Concerning the genre analysis, Machin and Van Leeuwen refer to Longacre’s four different types of Genres. The narrative, which aims to entertain, the procedural, which explains how-to-do something; the expository, which describes the world and lastly the hortatory which aims at influencing the addressee. (Machin & T, 2014, pp. 174-175) According to Longacre, the above-mentioned different types of the genre can be characterized as chronological and or prescriptive.” Some narratives interfere with two different genres, one of which is the surface and the other one constitutes the “deep structure”. (Machin & T, 2014, pp. 174-176) For instance, in the case of fairytales, the narrative is just the surface and the deep structure is hortatory because the storyteller’s purpose is to influence the addressee.

Machin and Van Leeuwen first examine linear genres and for that reason, they refer to Labov’s narrative stages, which according to him apply also to non-narrative genres. The narrative stages are six: the abstract, the orientation stage, the complication, the evaluation, the resolution, and the coda, which is the only optional one (Machin & T, 2014, pp. 176-178).

In multimodal texts, which consist not only of written text but also of other forms, such as pictures, the structure is non-linear. The structure in these texts can be horizontal, for example, the picture on the left side of the page and the text on the right side, or visual, where one element is above the other; lastly the structure can be concentric, in this case, the core information is located in the center (Machin & T, 2014, p. 179).

Finally, Machin and Van Leeuwen examine genre in two different versions of the magazine Cosmopolitan, and they enlighten the social aspect of the genre analysis. More specifically, their analysis has to do with the problem-solution genre in international versions of the above-mentioned magazine. (Machin & T, 2014, p. 180) For this purpose, they used the Dutch and Indian versions and they examined how women’s work is presented in each version and what is the role of images in each case. The topic selection and the way that this topic is presented are strongly influenced by the woman’s role in each society. (Machin & T, 2014, pp. 181-190)

Genres’ social aspect.

According to Tardy and Swales, genres are strongly influenced by social values since they constitute a rhetorical category that is compounded by social context. Αs they state, “Genres both shape and are shaped by the communities and contexts in which they exist.” (Tardy & Swales, 2014, p. 166) That’s why Bateman in his book “Multimodality and Genre” (Bateman, 2008, p. 184) refers to two perspectives on genre; the genre as social semiotic and the genre as social action.

The social semiotic perspective reflects Halliday’s theory and systematic-functional linguistics. According to this theory, language is strongly bonded with society and culture. The main task of a linguist according to the systematic-functional theory is to stipulate the expectations between features of a social situation and identifiable linguistic features (Bateman, 2008, p. 185). Moreover, according to Bateman within the frame of this theory, texts and communicative events that are characterized by a specific genre are seen as “staged sequences of purposive actions, where each stage can take on a distinctive register.” (Bateman, 2008, p. 185)

The social action perspective, on the other hand, reflects the North American linguists’ ideas, Chomsky’s genetic grammar, and Hymes’ ethnomethodology. (Bateman, 2008, p. 188) Besides that, traditions from literary and rhetorical studies helped to the institution of the New Rhetoric, which provided the area where specific usages of the genre could grow. Language utterances are seen as “social activity types” and these are later absorbed into the genre. (Bateman, 2008, p. 188)

Media Discourse.

O’ Keefe in her book “Investigating Media Discourse” (O'Keeffe, 2006, p. 16) refers to the characteristics of media discourse, which are the following.

• Participants are often unfamiliar with each other.
• The addresser (media persona) is often ‘’known’’ to the audience, but the audience (the addressee) is unfamiliar with the media persona.
• The participants of the conversation are not equal. Usually, one (the media persona) has more power than the other participant and so can control the conversation at all levels (opening, closing, turn-taking).
• Even if the audience reacts to what it hears or watches, this has no impact on the ongoing utterance.
• Due to the wide usage of the internet, any media audience has the potential to be global.

These characteristics though refer mostly to traditional media, in this essay, I will examine genre in social media, which constitutes a new and widely used form of communication, advertisement, and socialization.

Social media genre analysis.

Social media have been so widely used during the last few years that have turned into a social phenomenon, that has stigmatized an entire generation. In this essay, I will do a genre analysis of Instagram discourse. Instagram accounts are distinguished into two categories, private accounts, and professional accounts. I will, also, examine the language used in both of those two categories and point out the differences. The most important characteristic of professional accounts is that they have many communication goals; the main goal is to influence, and that’s why professional Instagrammers are also called influencers. So, in terms of the Longacrean genre analysis Instagram posts belong to the hortatory type of genre (Machin & T, 2014, pp. 174-176). Additionally, most of the time they also aim to advertise a product.

The following images reflect an Instagram post of a Greek Instagram persona, named “Fosbloque”, who creates mainly fashion-related content. In this post, she is advertising a pair of sneakers and at the same time, she suggests a specific outfit. So, we could say that this post is both an advertisement and a fashion-related suggestion.