Start Date

16-8-2018 12:00 AM

Description

While the predominant and officially stated purpose of social media platforms, such as Facebook, is to facilitate online engagement with friends, family, and other users, it does so ‘at a cost’. A more subtle and hidden agenda embedded in these platforms is to constantly monitor and gather data about users with the intent to capitalize. In this paper, we argue that the multimodal elements used on social media websites are used to entice engagement, while the use of dataveillance is almost totally hidden from its multimodal discourse. Drawing on the frameworks of Lemke (2002) and Pauwels (2012) we demonstrate the use of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, using Facebook’s sign-up web page. As such, this paper provides a methodological contribution by demonstrating how Multimodal Discourse Analysis could be used to uncover such hidden meanings, agendas and motives.

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Aug 16th, 12:00 AM

Facebook and Dataveillance: Demonstrating a Multimodal Discourse Analysis

While the predominant and officially stated purpose of social media platforms, such as Facebook, is to facilitate online engagement with friends, family, and other users, it does so ‘at a cost’. A more subtle and hidden agenda embedded in these platforms is to constantly monitor and gather data about users with the intent to capitalize. In this paper, we argue that the multimodal elements used on social media websites are used to entice engagement, while the use of dataveillance is almost totally hidden from its multimodal discourse. Drawing on the frameworks of Lemke (2002) and Pauwels (2012) we demonstrate the use of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, using Facebook’s sign-up web page. As such, this paper provides a methodological contribution by demonstrating how Multimodal Discourse Analysis could be used to uncover such hidden meanings, agendas and motives.