An Exploration of Various Ideologies in Pakistani Social Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Ideologies are the representations of social practices resulted from particular perspectives of the members of a society. Social media has been credited with playing a major part in the projection of some hidden ideologies. The study tries to analyze how language is manipulated in the construction of ideologies and how these ideologies represent or challenge the sociocultural norms of a society. Moreover, it also investigates the role of social media in propagation and circulation of specific beliefs and perspectives. CDA is a particular study which attempts to analyze and highlight the ideologies proposed both implicitly and explicitly. CDA is primarily concerned with the issues of racism, gender stereotypes and sociocultural norms of a society. The data consists of nine posts selected from different pages of Instagram and drawn through purposive sampling. Qualitative approach is used to analyze the data. The study draws its theoretical framework from Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model. The findings reveal that social media plays a pivotal role in the representation of some sociocultural ideologies as well as the construction of anti- sociocultural ideologies.