How do social media metadata features like hashtags (#) support processes of ‘ambient affiliation’? This book undertakes a social semiotic analysis to explore this question, through enacting particular communicative functions on various social media platforms.

Metadata such as the hashtag is an important dimension of social media communication. Despite its important role in practices such as curating, tagging, and searching content, there has been little research into how meanings are made with social metadata. This book considers how hashtags have expanded their reach from an information-locating resource to an interpersonal resource for coordinating social relationships and expressing solidarity, affinity, and affiliation. It adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate the communicative functions of hashtags in relation to both language and images. This book is a follow up to Zappavigna’s 2012 model of ambient affiliation, providing an extended analytical framework for exploring how affiliation occurs, bond by bond, in online discourse. It focuses in particular on the communing function of hashtags in metacommentary and ridicule, using recent Twitter discourse about US President Donald Trump as a case study. It is essential reading for researchers as well as undergraduates studying social media on any academic course.

"This work fits in nicely with recent studies of language on-line, digital literacy, language use in social media, and digital discourse. The book presents an excellent case for using the Appraisal Framework to analyze interaction in social media ... I see a lot of potential for future research analyzing hashtags used on and off line, in fact reading this book has led me to conduct some of my own research on hashtags. Zappavigna’s discussion of hashtags as a form of meta-discourse that goes beyond known meanings of metadiscourse, I found particularly inspiring." - LINGUIST List

"A rigorous and technical framework for understanding the social meaning of one of the most iconic linguistic forms of digital communication: the hashtag ... Readers who are tired of the popular trope about how social media is impoverishing our communication will be thrilled by Searchable Talk’s meticulous and in-depth linguistic analysis of all the shades of social meaning that hashtags add to our digital communication." - Babel: The Language Magazine

"A valuable and useful account ... Not only does this monograph flesh out Zappavigna’s SFL-based approach to the examination of social media communication, it provides the most comprehensive account of hashtags from a social semiotic/SFL perspective that I am aware of, and will be of interest to researchers and research students alike." - Discourse & Communication

"Zappavigna's monograph is one that should be read from cover to cover. This is an informative and inspiring book that is bound to invite new research not only on hashtags but also on communication on social media taken as a whole. #MustRead for all linguists interested in social media communication." - Journal of Pragmatics

"Searchable Talk is the first book-length treatment of social media hashtags from a linguistics perspective. Through a wide array of verbal and visual examples, Zappavigna wonderfully shows how hashtags function in real contexts. This is an invaluable source for scholars and students interested in digital communication. #comprehensive #insightful #readable #innovative #fascinating." - Mariza Georgalou, Lecturer in Linguistics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

"Zappavigna employs her impressive technical knowhow not as an end in itself but to inform an insightful systemic functional analysis of hashtag practices. This book sheds light on the meanings construed by hashtags through processes of intertextuality, (dis)alignment, attribution, evaluation and metacommentary, whilst extending linguistic theory to account for social media discourse" - Caroline Tagg, Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language, The Open University, UK

"Compelling and exciting." - BAAL Newsletter

"All ten chapters systematically outline and further develop the adopted theoretical framework as well as reveal new and highly relevant findings ... An essential read for scholars interested in exploring the functions of hashtags in social media communication in general." - Internet Pragmatics