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In:Corpus Approaches to Social Media:
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 98] 2020
► pp. 41–62

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Chapter 2
The control and censorship of linguistic resources in an online Community of Practice

 | University of Manchester
Published online: 4 November 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.02don
Abstract
This research utilises a corpus of one million posts retrieved from Popheads, an online Reddit-based Community of Practice (CoP), to analyse the power dynamics associated with language censorship in online CoPs. In 2018, the moderators of the community banned the community-salient word wig (‘surprised’ or ‘impressed’). Ostensibly, this was a top-down performance of linguistic control where the officially-appointed moderators put a stop to the diffusion of a seemingly beloved part of the community’s shared linguistic repertoire. However, through a mixed-methods analysis of the events surrounding the banning of wig, this research shows that moderators have not unilaterally enforced linguistic censorship. Instead, moderators have seemingly responded to a call, led primarily by members with markers of unofficial power, to restrict usage.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Community of Practice framework
  • 3.The Popheads community
    • 3.1Power in the Popheads community
  • 4.Hypotheses
  • 5.Data
  • 6.Why wig?
  • 7.The lifespan of wig
    • 7.1The emergence and significance of wig
    • 7.2The backlash against wig
    • 7.3After the ban
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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