Hashtags in social networks: Intentions and affordances (exemplified in the English language by message groups on the topic “food”)

Abstract

In the paper, the Internet communication is regarded as a new form of social activity as well as a marking and symbolic system. The object of the empirical study is one of the genres of Internet discourse – social networks. The subject is intentions and affordances expressed at the linguistic level. As a research material, a group of hashtag-labeled messages was chosen on the topic “Food” in the popular social networks Facebook and Instagram. The authors of the paper set the following objectives: to consider the main features and peculiarities of Internet discourse; to describe the option of implementing a personal Internet discourse within the social networks on the example of hashtags in popular English social networks – Facebook and Instagram; to study the intentions and affordances of hashtags at the level of their hypertext potential. The work is focused on the analysis of the universal – linguistic, social and cognitive – laws of the functioning of Internet communication within the framework of social networks, for which a synergistic approach is used, namely, a variety of methods of different levels and directions: comparative-contrastive analysis, the method of continuous sampling, etymological analysis, generalization. Analyzing affordanсes of hashtags on the subject “Food”, the authors of the paper identify the following theme groups according to the type of needs. Further, the text content of the memo-hashtag is considered with its lexical-stylistic, syntactic and phonetic-graphic techniques used to attract readers’ attention and popularize them. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the affordances of hashtags on the theme “Food” within the genre of a personal Internet discourse of social networks (Facebook and Instagram) are implemented through informing, distributing and searching for information, as well as actualizing the intentions of the user. Communication in social networks is also built by means of meme-hashtags that convey the image, style and idea. Meme-hashtags analysis allowed revealing the peculiarities of its text content: 1) lexical and stylistic: colloquial lexicon and basilects; printing style; author’s style; precedence; teles-copy; 2) syntactic: prevalence of simple extended sentences of different forms of the statement of purpose; 3) phonetic and graphic as an effective means of oral speech creation (emoticons instead of intonation, ellipsis as a pause, capital letters or repetition of words for logical stress). The revealed and described lexical-stylistic, phonetic-graphic and syntactic features of the text content of meme-hashtags illustrate the typical properties of Internet communication texts. On the whole, the authors conclude that Internet-discourse has the following characteristics: freedom of interpretation, inconsistency, efficiency, brevity, freedom (speech creativity), synthesis of oral and written forms of speech. The specificity of communication in social networks lies in its basis on the hypertext and is implemented by means of creolization.