Evaluating Identities Online

This book examines how identities are constructed in digital, multimodal discourse, and how these identities (gender, age, race, ethnicity, professional, etc.) are generally evaluated as they are claimed, attributed, verified, and non-verified intersubjectively in a polymedia space. Although the construction of online identity has been addressed in the literature, the online construction of identity in the Spanish speaking world has received less focused attention. This volume contains chapters by renowned specialists in pragmatics and digital communication, and is the most recent output of an ongoing externally funded project (UPO-1380703). The book includes a state-of-the-art introduction by the editors followed by three main sections: the first is devoted to examining digital identifies in conflict; the second addresses self-presentation on Twitter and Instagram, with a special focus on politics and gender; and finally, the third addresses identity construction in the genre of online reviews. All of the chapters address self and other identity construction in contexts of both convergence and controversy, in a variety of digital social platforms and practices related to gender, age, political stance, race, ethnicity, and lifestyle. Further, many of these chapters approach identity construction from a contrastive perspective, and thus address variation. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate, and advanced undergraduate students in sociolinguistics, (contrastive) pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies, linguistic anthropology, and communication studies, among others. Patricia Bou-Franch is Professor at the Department of English and German, and director of the Research Institute of Applied Modern Languages (IULMA), at the University of València, Spain. Her research interests include digital discourse analysis, (cross-cultural) pragmatics, and (im)politeness and conflict. Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in linguistics. She is interested in im/politeness, genre models, identity construction, and traditional and digital media.