Introduction to the Special Issue: The Social Mediatization of the Economy: Texts, Discourses, and Participation

Abstract

The starting point of this Special Issue of Language@Internet is the observation that discourse on economics and finance has been shifting in terms of genre, register, and context, and that novel forms of online engagement are crucially symbiotic in these shifts. We propose to analyse these new contexts through the analytical concept of social mediatization, which permits close engagement with the influence of particular affordances on the enregisterment, vernacularization, recontextualization, and rescripting of particular features and fragments of discourse on the economy. While the main, but not exclusive, focus of the issue lies on engagements with euro crisis discourse, the framework is applicable to a wide variety of contemporary media engagements.