Nexus Analysis as a framework for Social Media Studies: Invited keynote

For more than a decade, social media have played a significant role in the everyday lives of young people; as a way of communicating, practicing friendships and constructing identity. Based on 15 years of research within this field, associate professor Malene Charlotte Larsen from Aalborg University, Denmark, will be discussing how Nexus Analysis (NA) (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) can be a fruitful framework for the study of online social interactions. Nexus analysis distinguishes itself from other discourse analytic approaches by focusing on central mediated actions carried out by social actors within a loosely tied ‘nexus of practice’ (rather than focusing solely on discourse). How do we methodologically go about analysing young people’s use of social media as a nexus of practice where different mediated actions, cultural artefacts and cycles of discourses intersect? How can we understand and analyse all the “non-language stuff” on social media such as algorithms, liking, tagging and photo sharing from a nexus analytical point of view? And how can concepts from Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA) (Scollon 2001a, 2001b) and Nexus Analysis be used to conceptualise young people’s practices of maintaining friendships and constructing identity online? Ron Scollon did not especially care for social media and the development in the media landscape in general, but – as this plenary lecture will argue – with MDA and NA he developed a methodological and theoretical framework quite suitable for empirical studies of interactions taking place on sites and apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat (Larsen & Raudaskoski, 2018). The lecture proposes a refinement of nexus analysis and thereby presents a framework for the study of online social practices, that takes into account that these practices are constituted multimodally by participants’ communicative performances.