Minding the Gap: A Discourse Analysis on Corporate and Adolescent Users on Snapchat

Abstract

This MRP investigates popular discourses within commercial social media. Through examining Snapchat, this MRP suggests that there are two main influences that dictate the cultural language used within the Snapchat community – the adolescent user and the corporate user. By applying Gee’s Discourse Analysis Tools (Gee, 2014), this MRP seeks to understand how both users demonstrate their co-constructed cultural language proficiencies by constructing multimodal texts and provide discussion that explains for what purposes that language is used. This MRP has found that there are clear neoliberal influences that may shape adolescent identity formation. However, adolescents also demonstrate that they are just as influential towards the larger meaning making of cultural language within their community. Understanding the adolescent perspective is important, because they are the group who have grown up with social media. (Joosten, 2012) Therefore, the insights that they have may have are valuable when attempting to understand the impact that social media has on their process of meaning making. Juxtaposing both the adolescent and corporate user, this MRP intends to show effective uses of social media and how each user uses their competency to construct and re-construct meaning based on their goals. Providing this perspective will in turn allow educators to reflect upon their practice, and hopefully gain insights to using the innate abilities of adolescents, in addition to re-appropriating techniques currently used by neoliberal influences to conversely benefit adolescent learning.