PANEL 1

Dispersed Identities, Displaced Ideologies: New Approaches to Compressed Social Media Genres

Panel organised by Eva Triebl, Johann Wolfgang Unger, Luke Liu

Compressed social media genres – including short videos, audio memes, image slideshows, and their associated comment ecologies – concentrate communicative work into small, rapidly circulating units. Their compression is not merely temporal: it can redistribute interpretive labour and relocate authority to those who select, frame, evaluate, and stabilize meaning (Ye & Ruyang 2026). Meaning is also distributed across speech, writing, image, sound, embodied performance, and recognizable aesthetic conventions, while contextualization is delegated to titles, captions, hashtags, creator profiles, comments, and mechanisms of circulation. The individual artifact is therefore part of a broader communicative ecology.

These conditions complicate the task of locating ideology. Ideological orientations may emerge relationally across semiotic choices, metadiscursive framing, interactional uptake, and algorithmically structured participation (Balirano, Demata & KhosraviNik 2026). They may also be displaced from overt political articulation into discourses organized around personal experience, taste, wellbeing, memory, consumption, and self-fashioning, where they operate through affective and aesthetic evaluation. Nor do the orientations emerging across these layers necessarily cohere: shared formats may be understood as generic participation or in-group identity performance, feminist activism may coexist with commodified self-branding, and similar scripts may address different publics.

This panel examines the theoretical and methodological implications of this challenge. The papers address three interrelated dimensions of compressed social media discourse: (i) the orchestration of meaning across modes and temporal stages within digital artifacts; (ii) its recontextualization through metadiscursive framing, interactional uptake, circulation, and platform infrastructures; and (iii) the identities, participation norms, and ideological positions negotiated through affective and aesthetic conventions. Collectively, they investigate how ideological positions are established, negotiated, contested, or obscured and develop empirically grounded approaches to tracing the political and normative force of compressed social media genres, whether embedded in familiar and appealing formats or articulated through overtly polarizing discourse.

References

Balirano, G., Demata, M., & KhosraviNik, M. (2026). Transformative approaches to discourse studies: Towards a renewed theory of critique in platformed environments. Paper presented at CADAAD 2026, University of Valladolid, Spain.

Fairclough, N. (2016). A dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis in social research. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse studies (3rd ed., pp. 86-108). Sage.

KhosraviNik, M. (2018). Social media techno-discursive design, affective communication and contemporary politics. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 11(3), 427-442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0226-y

KhosraviNik, M., & Unger, J. W. (2016). Critical discourse studies and social media: Power, resistance and critique in changing media ecologies. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse studies (3rd ed., pp. 205-233). Sage.

Page, R., Barton, D., Lee, C., Unger, J. W., & Zappavigna, M. (2022). Researching language and social media: A student guide (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003121763

Ye, H., & Ruyang, L. (2026). Compressing stories, producing authority: Retelling practices and interpretive control in platformed video re-creations. Discourse, Context & Media, 73, 101035. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2026.101035

PANEL 2

Exploring post-digital lives: Identities, intimacies and interactions across online and offline spaces

Panel organised by Caroline Tagg and Andreas Candefors Stæhr

This panel is concerned with understanding how everyday intimate communication is carried out across online and offline social contexts in contemporary societies. For some time, researchers have been concerned with understanding how digital technologies permeate people’s everyday lives and shape the ways in which online and offline identities, relations, and linguistic styles merge and overlap. In this panel, we acknowledge that online and offline contexts often intersect, creating hybrid scenarios in which the distinction between them becomes blurred. At the same time, we recognize that these contexts are also often maintained as distinct or deliberately kept apart. Accordingly, this panel explores when, how and why people create hybrid interactional scenarios in which online and offline identity work, social relations, intimacies, and other interactional practices coalesce, as well as when, how and why these online and offline practices are sometimes kept separate. Our particular focus is on developing and refining methodologies that enable such a holistic and complex understanding of people’s communicative lives.

We situate our panel within an emerging and varied body of work which understands contemporary communication as ‘post-digital’ not in the sense that it is no longer digital but that digital and mobile technologies have fundamentally altered society, creating new social and communicative practices of which the digital is an inherent and largely accepted part (Jandrić et al., 2023). We now live our lives within an ‘online-offline nexus’ (Blommaert, 2019), in which social goals at various levels or scales are completed through entanglements of online and offline actions (Androutsopoulous, forthcoming 2027). These include, for example, the coordination of the online and offline in an immediate action or in a series of online and offline actions that collectively accomplish a social goal over time, as well as actions that are deliberately kept distinct. The challenge for digital discourse analysts is to expand their analytical gaze to ‘a wider framing of what counts’ (Bhatt, 2023) and to develop the methodological tools to address these new social and communicative conditions (Tagg and Thompson, forthcoming 2026) with particular attention to examining, rather than assuming, how people experience the relationship between online and offline practices and context (Stæhr, 2026).

            This panel brings together researchers at different career stages and from across national contexts to explore existing and emerging postdigital methodological approaches and datasets which draw variously on pragmatics, multimodality, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Our focus is on understanding how multiple and often conflicting identities and intimacies are accomplished in the online-offline nexus, including such issues as performativity, discursive positioning and othering across contexts, communicative norms, authenticities, ideologies, and mobilities. The panel will pave the way for an analytical approach to understanding contemporary lives under current post-digital conditions.

PANEL 3

Platformed Parenthood: Technodiscursive Infrastructures of Care and Family Life

Panel organised by Jai Mackenzie and Giorgia Riboni

Social media platforms have become important sites for the representation, regulation and circulation of parental identities and caring practices. Early work exploring the digital construction of parenthood often foregrounded the empowering potential of online parenting communities (Madge & O’Connor 2006; Pedersen & Smithson 2013) and the interplay between social discourse and individual agency for users of these spaces (Jaworska 2017; Mackenzie 2017). The emphasis of more recent research, however, has shifted to recognise the ways in which techno-social logics are increasingly entangled with parenting knowledge and practices of care, including careful engagement with platforms’ technological infrastructures, algorithmic principles and commercial imperatives (see Machin et al. 2025; Park 2026). In response to these shifts, this panel centres new perspectives on the digital circulation of care and family life, considering how contemporary parenting identities and practices can shape and be shaped by the communicative norms, technological affordances and ideological pressures of social media platforms and cultures.

Contributors will investigate platformed parenthood across a variety of social media genres, including content produced by influencers, professionals and everyday users in the form of text-based discussion, photography, short-form video and long-form video. Authors will consider topics such as the promotion of neoliberal logics around individual responsibility and emotional resilience in therapy clips circulated on social media (Zhao), representations of childcare and domestic labour in tradwife discourse (Pilyarchuk and Graf), challenges to traditional understandings of parenthood by same-sex content creators (Zottola), the construction of authentic personas by infant feeding influencers (Coffey-Glover and Ridge-Vesty), commercialised expressions of contemporary fatherhood at the margins of normative parenting discourse (Mackenzie), and the digital articulation of maternal rage between medicalization and resistance (Riboni). Together, the panel represents a cutting-edge investigation of how platformed infrastructures shape circulating knowledges of parenting, care and expertise, and how parenting practices are intertwined with wider issues of authenticity, self-promotion and commodification.

References

Jaworska, S. (2017). “Bad” mums and the “untellable”: Narrative practices and agency in online stories about postnatal depression on Mumsnet. Discourse, Context & Media 25, 25-33.

Machin, D., Ledin, P. and Zhao, W. (2025). How the nature of social media platforms supports faulty knowledge production by influencers: The case of nutrition guidance for mothers on Chinese social media. Discourse, Context & Media 64, 100866.

Mackenzie, J. (2017). ‘Can we have a child exchange?’ Constructing and subverting the ‘good mother’ through play in Mumsnet Talk. Discourse & Society 28(3), 296-312.

Madge, C. and O’Connor, H. (2006). Parenting gone wired: Empowerment of new mothers on the internet?’ Social & Cultural Geography 7(2),199-220.

Park, Y. (2026). The guilt economy: Mediated discourse and the commercialisation of working motherhood in Korean Instagram advertising. Discourse, Context & Media 73, 101044.

Pedersen, S. and Smithson, J. (2013). Mothers with attitude - how the Mumsnet parenting forum offers space for new forms of femininity to emerge online, Women’s Studies International Forum 38, 97-106.

PANEL 4

Online identities and digital discourses of the Nation

Panel organised by Massimiliano Demata

Far from receding in an age of globalisation, the nation has re-emerged as a powerful political and cultural force, challenging earlier visions of an increasingly borderless world. At the same time, digital media have profoundly transformed the communicative environments in which national belonging is imagined. Digital platforms are now crucial arenas for the construction, negotiation and contestation of national identities.

Taking these two developments as its starting point, the panel approaches national belonging as a form of platformed collective identity and builds on the well-established understanding that nations are not simply reflected in language but constructed through discourse. Much of the foundational research on national identity, however, predates the emergence of social media as a central space of political communication. Changes in how discourse is produced, circulated and made visible also affect how the nation itself is constituted and therefore require us to reconsider not only where national identities are expressed, but also how they are produced under platformed conditions.

At the heart of the panel is the constitutive role of digital discourse in this process. Social media have unsettled the hierarchical model associated with traditional political and mass-mediated communication by allowing users to take up national meanings and reshape them through participation. Networked interaction also alters the ways in which these meanings gain visibility and resonance. Online communities may form around national symbols and narratives, while the boundaries of belonging are negotiated through forms of interaction shaped by platform design. These developments complicate the relationship between online and offline nationhood. Territorial identities are reproduced in digital environments that extend beyond territorial borders, while diasporic belonging shows how national affiliation can be rescaled online. Supranational identities likewise call into question the assumed correspondence between nation and territory.

A central concern is how the communicative conditions of digital platforms may reshape established forms of nationalism, enable their renegotiation and/or create new forms. The panel draws on recent work on digital nationalism, including Fuchs’s account of nationalism on the Internet and Mihelj and Jiménez-Martínez’s influential conceptualisation of “digital nationalism”, while bringing discourse more fully to the centre of the discussion. The distinctive contribution of the panel lies in approaching digital nationalism as an ongoing process of meaning-making in which platformed practices help to shape the production and circulation of national imaginaries. The nation is therefore understood not as a stable identity transferred online, but as one whose meanings and boundaries may change through digital practice.

The panel reflects the range of approaches found in contemporary digital discourse analysis. The papers examine the persistence of dominant narratives while also exploring how digitally mediated participation can open them to contestation. Some contributions bring critical discourse analysis into dialogue with multimodal analysis, while others draw on cognitive-linguistic or social-semiotic perspectives. Further insights come from research on online public-sphere formation and platform governance. Across the studies presented in the panel, the focus moves between political communication and diasporic experience, with other contributions examining wartime digital culture or the techno-discursive organisation of platformed interaction. Together, these perspectives illuminate the role of affective and visual resources in national identification and consider how platform affordances influence the circulation of national meanings.

Selected contributions to the forthcoming edited volume Digital Discourses of the Nation, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2027, are brought together here. Taken together, the papers place nationhood within current debates on digital identity and suggest that digital environments do more than provide new channels for national discourse. They reshape the conditions under which collective identities are made visible, recognised and contested.

PANEL 5

Constructing and deconstructing pathologised selves: Digital tactics, algorithmic environments, consequences and resistance across X, Instagram and TikTok

Panel organised by Manuel Padilla Cruz

Social media platforms serve as key arenas where digital identities are continuously constructed, negotiated and contested under platform-specific affordances (Davin 2022; Georgalou 2017). A particularly pernicious phenomenon within these spaces is pathologisation, understood as the discursive portrayal of individuals, groups or institutions as affected by some illness or disorder (Maruzza 2021). Following Jones et al. (2015), identity pathologisation on social media platforms may be considered a digital social practice. Building on identity construction frameworks (Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Georgakopoulou 2021), this practice aims at imposing a harmful and degrading identity through indexical, positional and relational dynamics (Padilla Cruz 2026).

This panel will centre on the discursive mechanisms of identity pathologisation across three distinct platform environments: X, Instagram and TikTok. It seeks to gather works that combine corpus linguistics with digital discourse analytic and sociopragmatic approaches and methodologies. Contributions are expected to examine how platformed identities ranging from distinct (marginalised) communities to (prominent) public figures are discursively denigrated through pathologisation.

Special attention will be given to how platform-specific semiotic and technological affordances –e.g., short-form video performativity on TikTok, visual storytelling on Instagram and text-based threads on X– shape different pathologising tactics. Beyond mapping delegitimising mechanisms, the panel also aims to focus on the consequences of pathologisation and the avenues for resistance. Papers are therefore expected to explore how targeted individuals and communities counteract pathologising strategies and narratives through discursive strategies of reframing, authentication and social restitution (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2024). Additionally, the panel will scrutinise the role of forgiveness and counter-discourse in restoring ruined identities, examining whether digital affordances hinder or facilitate long-term identity repair.

References

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.

Darvin, R. (2022). Design, resistance and the performance of identity on TikTok. Discourse, Context & Media, 46, 100591.

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2024). Pragmatics, (im)politeness, and intergroup communication: A multilayered, discursive analysis of Cancel Culture. Cambridge University Press

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2021). Analysing identity. In M. Haugh, D. Z. Kádar & M. Terkourafi (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of sociopragmatics (pp. 293-314). Cambridge University Press

Georgalou, M. (2017). Discourse and identity on Facebook. Bloomsbury Academic.

Jones, R. H., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (2015). Introduction. Discourse analysis and digital practices. In R. H. Jones, A. Chik & C. A. Hafner (Eds.), Discourse and digital practices. Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 1-17). Routledge.

Maruzza, C. (2021). Herramientas conceptuales para contrarrestar la patologización trans en la formación de Psicología en Argentina. Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad, 37, 1-19.

Padilla Cruz, M. (2026). Identity pathologisation and ambient affiliation on X: A relevance-theoretic approach. In M. Mišković-Luković & N. Manojlović (Eds.), Beyond the frontiers: Perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice (pp. 89-111). University of Kragujevac.

PANEL 6

Contested Meanings: Disinformation, Counter-Discourses and Resistance in the Public Sphere

Panel organised by Maria Dolores Porto Requejo and Maria Isabel Alonso Belmonte

Disinformation has become a pervasive feature of contemporary public communication, shaping political agendas, social debates, and civic engagement. However, public controversies are not only characterized by the circulation of misleading or false information, but also by the emergence of counter-discourses that challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative interpretations of social and political realities.

While a substantial body of research has focused on the production, dissemination, and effects of disinformation (Wardle & Derakhshan 2017, Sampio & Carratalá 2022, Grieve & Woodfield 2023, Maci et al. 2024, Taboada 2025), comparatively less attention has been devoted to the communicative practices through which resistance is articulated, alternative narratives are developed, and dominant representations are contested (Butler 2009, Van Djik 2024). Exploring these processes is essential for understanding contemporary forms of public debate, addressing affective polarization, and fostering more inclusive democratic communication.

These competing narratives are constructed through a variety of cognitive, social, discursive, and multimodal strategies that seek to influence public perceptions, mobilize support, and reinforce collective identities. Such dynamics are particularly evident in contentious debates surrounding issues such as gender identity, feminism, immigration, climate change, health crises, and geopolitical conflicts. Across traditional and digital media alike, different social and political actors engage in ongoing struggles over meaning, legitimacy, and truth, shaping how events and processes are understood in the public sphere.

This panel invites contributions that examine the discursive construction of disinformation, dissent, and resistance, as well as the complex interactions among them. We welcome abstracts addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• The discursive construction of disinformation, dissent, and resistance across different socio-political contexts and public debates.
• Linguistic, rhetorical, cognitive, and multimodal strategies used to challenge, negotiate, or reinforce hegemonic narratives.
• The affordances and constraints of different semiotic modes (textual, visual, and aural) and media environments (digital and non-digital) in the construction and circulation of dissenting and resistant discourses.
• The role of discourse in shaping collective identities, ideological positioning, and social mobilisation in contexts of conflict and controversy.

The panel is particularly interested in contributions informed by Critical and SocioCognitive Linguistics and related approaches to discourse analysis, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and other frameworks that explore the relationships between language, cognition, ideology, and social practice. Empirical studies in the fields of gender, politics, education and immigration are particularly welcomed, but also other fields like health, environment or globalization and interdisciplinary perspectives will contribute to a broader view of ongoing public discourse in the digital sphere and so contribute to a deeper understanding of how public discourses are produced, contested, and transformed.

References

Butler, J. (2009). Critique, dissent, disciplinarity. Critical Inquiry, 35(4), 773–795.

Grieve, J., & Woodfield, H. (2023). The Language of Fake News. Cambridge University Press.

Maci, S. M., Demata, M., McGlashan, M., & Seargeant, P. (2023). The various dimensions of disinformation. In Maci et al. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation. Routledge.

Sampio, D. P., & Carratalá, A. (2022). Injecting disinformation into public space: Pseudo-media and reality-altering narratives. Profesional de la información, 31(3).

Taboada, M. (2025). Linguistic approaches to fake news research are growing and maturing: commentary on a special issue. Linguistics Vanguard.

Van Dijk, T. (2024). Social movement discourse: An introduction. Routledge. Wardle C., and Derakhshan H. (2017). Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making. Council of Europe.

PANEL 7

Creating multivoiced author identities in digital discourse: Production, participation, and personification

Panel organised by Hanwool Choe, Cynthia Gordon and Alla Tovares

Online identity construction is increasingly difficult to trace to a singular source or authorial voice. Behind any post, image, or video, the question of who is “speaking” is often obscured: content may be authored, edited, ghostwritten, algorithmically curated, and/or commented on by multiple contributors, human and otherwise. Moreover, online identity is also voiced through personification, as when virtual humans or animated/fictional characters are treated as authorial selves. Identities online are thus not simply performed but also veiled and potentially distributed across unseen contributors, tools, platforms, and even simulated personas. This panel takes digital content (TikTok videos, Instagram posts/reels, podcasts, user comments, and blog entries) as a rich site for examining this phenomenon. Scholars have shown that voicing is shaped by platform infrastructure (e.g., Eisenlauer 2014, Page 2022), intertextual repetition (e.g., Gordon 2023), and user engagement (e.g., Choe 2021), and occurs in diverse digital contexts, including food-related communication (e.g., Hsiao 2019), consumer reviews (e.g., Vásquez 2014), political trolling (e.g., Tovares 2019), pet social media (e.g., Choe 2020, Piskorska 2026), and beauty vlogging (e.g., Bhatia 2023).

Extending Goffman's (1981) production format (author, animator, principal) and Bakhtin's (1981) notions of voicing and heteroglossia, this panel aims to disentangle the layered contributions embedded in seemingly single-authored content. We analyze digital discourse as a multivoiced production: a “text” in which distinct social voices, attributed to (virtual) humans or animated and fictional characters, are woven together to create, for example, anthropomorphized foods offering kitchen advice, user comments that speak directly to virtual humans, and multivoiced “drops” of intermixed fictional character dialogue and music in podcasts. This panel explores how the complexity of the author identity in these contexts emerges as an ongoing, collaboratively assembled achievement as utterances are voiced (animated, in Goffman’s terms) by a human, a persona, or an animated stand-in. We argue that this layered, multivoiced lens offers a more accurate model for understanding authorial identity in digitally mediated communication, with implications for studies of authenticity, trust, and influence online.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. University of Texas Press.

Bhatia, Aditi (2023). Digital influencers and online expertise: The linguistic power of beauty vloggers. Routledge.

Choe, Hanwool (2020). Talking the cat: Footing lamination in a Korean livestream of cats mukbang. Journal of Pragmatics, 160, 60-79.

Choe, Hanwool (2021). “Mukbang as your digital tablemate: Creating commensality online.” In: Tovares, Alla and Cynthia Gordon (Eds), Identity and ideology in digital food discourse: Social media interactions across cultural contexts, (pp. 137-170). Bloomsbury.

Eisenlauer, Volker (2014). Facebook as a third author—(Semi-)automated participation framework in Social Network Sites. Journal of pragmatics, 72, 73-85.

Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gordon, Cynthia (2023). Intertextuality 2.0: Metadiscourse and meaning-making in an online community. Oxford University Press.

Hsiao, Chi-hua (2019). Linguistic strategies prompting interactions in recipes from Mandarin Chinese food blogs. Text & Talk, 39(4), 489-510.

Page, Ruth (2022). Co-tellership in social media storytelling. In: Dawson, Paul, Maria Mäkelä (Eds), The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (pp. 120-133). Routledge

Piskorska, Agnieszka (2026). Animal personas, ambivalent judgements, and affective effects in social media reels. Internet Pragmatics, 9(1), 150-173.

Tovares, Alla (2019). “Trolling as creative insurgency: The carnivalesque delegitimization of Putin and his supporters in online newspaper commentary.” In: Ross, Andrew and Damian Rivers (Eds), Discourses of (De)legitimization: Participatory Culture in Digital Contexts (pp. 228–247). Routledge.

Vásquez, Camilla (2014). The discourse of online consumer reviews. Bloomsbury.

PANEL 8

Believing, Belonging, and Boundary-Making: Belief as Identity Work On- and Offline

Panel organised by Ana Piroh, Xandra Knappe, Yannis Yat Ho Wong and Birte Bös

Conspiracy theories, myths, supernatural narratives, lifestyle ideologies, and political worldviews differ considerably in content, yet they share a reliance on discursive strategies that render contested claims plausible and emotionally compelling. This panel explores how beliefs are linguistically and multimodally constructed across seemingly disparate digital spaces and how they shape identity at the personal, group, and collective level (Bös et al. 2018). Belief is thus understood here as “the experience of belonging” (Day 2021: 194), as an ongoing sociocultural identity practice, which is performed (Butler 1990) rather than possessed.

Believers are viewed as social actors who continuously (re-)produce, negotiate, display, police, and contest belief in interaction. They discursively accomplish their belonging through the signalling of group membership, claiming moral or epistemic authority, establishing credibility, and drawing boundaries to non-believers. In these processes, digital and offline environments are mutually constitutive rather than separate spheres, jointly shaping identities that emerge through the circulation of discursive repertoires across contexts: becoming a believer or non-believer thus entails adopting community-specific practices that negotiate claims to authenticity, responsibility, truthfulness, and legitimacy.

We invite contributions examining how digital actors establish credibility by presenting themselves as uniquely capable of recognising moral, political, or experiential truth, or “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 2015: 115), thereby authenticating their own identities while undermining competing accounts of reality and selfhood. Possible foci include, among others, the discursive strategies underlying conspiracy narratives and alternative epistemologies; the rhetoric of lifestyle as a marker of identity; the persuasive language of political belief; above all the construction of authenticity across different platforms and their translations into analogue contexts.

References

Barkun, Michael. 2015. Conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge. Diogenes 62 (3-4), 114-120.

Bös, Birte, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández (eds.). 2018. The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline. Personal – group – collective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Butler, Judith. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York/London: Routledge.

Day, Abby. 2011. Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PANEL 9

(Dis)connection and digital well-being practices: performing authentic, healthy, and anti-consumerist stances and identities

Panel organised by Tereza Spilioti and Korina Giaxoglou

As digital connection becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, people are also orienting towards practices of limiting screentime, strategic disengagement and disconnection. This shift coincides with a decline in the use of sharing as a keyword among social media platforms since mid 2020s (John, 2024). The current trend seems to be for consuming rather than producing online content in platforms increasingly dominated by professionally curated and algorithmically optimised content.  For boyd (2026) this suggests a shift from social to parasocial media, where relationships are structured less around interpersonal sociality and more around one-sided engagement with creators, influencers, and algorithmically amplified content. Against this backdrop, practices of digital disconnection have gained renewed visibility. While digital well-being research has often conceptualised these developments in terms of individual self-regulation and the management of digital technologies (Nguyen 2021), recent work in pragmatics and digital discourse studies suggests that connection and disconnection are also negotiated through situated language use, interaction, and everyday communicative practices (Tagg & Lyons 2024; Spilioti & Giaxoglou 2024).

This panel examines digital (dis)connection as an interactional and discursive phenomenon. From delayed responses and conversational silence to not-sharing, unfollowing, muting, deleting accounts, and adopting de-influencing practices, users draw on platform affordances as resources for managing visibility, availability, and participation. Through these and related practices, users position themselves and others as present or absent, authentic or fake, sociable or not, responsible or overwhelmed. By attending to the moment-by-moment negotiation of such positions in digital (dis)connection practices, the panel explores digital well-being as a discursive and relational accomplishment rather than an individual psychological state. At the same time, it recognises that notions of "healthy" digital behaviour are themselves socially negotiated through discourses of productivity, self-care, authenticity, privacy, sustainability, and resistance to consumer culture.

The panel brings together empirically grounded and theoretically informed papers drawing on a range of approaches, including interactional sociolinguistics, postdigital ethnography, narrative analysis, corpus linguistics and related methodologies to address the following questions:

• How are connection and disconnection accomplished through language and interaction?
• How do users position themselves and others through practices of (dis)connection?
• How do platform affordances shape these practices and their meanings?
• How are particular forms of selfhood, authenticity, wellbeing, and responsibility constructed through (dis)connection and related practices?
• What discourses of well-being, self-care, sustainability, and anti-consumerism are indexed through (dis)connection and related practices?
• What broader shifts in social media participation, platform cultures, and digital ideologies are reflected in practices such as not-sharing, de-influencing, muting, unfollowing, or deleting accounts?

Through this panel, we seek to conceptualise digital (dis)connection as a dynamic practice and to critically reflect on emerging practices, such as not-sharing and de-influencing, that challenge dominant assumptions about participation, visibility, consumption, and success in contemporary platform cultures.

References

boyd, d. (2026). Social media is now parasocial media. Social Media + Society 12 (2): https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261437487

John, N. (2024) Sharing and social media: The decline of a keyword. New Media & Society 26 (4): 1891-1908.

Nguyen, M. H. (2021). Managing social media use in an “always-on” society: Exploring digital wellbeing strategies that people use to disconnect. Mass Communication and Society 24 (6): 795-817.

Spilioti, T. & Giaxoglou, G. (2024). Taking a break from social media: Media ideologies of (not) sharing in celebrity culture. Journal of Pragmatics 231: 35-46.

Tagg, C. & Lyons, A. (2024). Conversational rhythm as a disconnective practice among middle-aged adults in situated mobile-messaging interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 229: 56-70.