The role of social media in the democratization of language and knowledge

The increasing popularity of Web 2.0 has resulted in an unprecedented surge of user-generated and social media content which is becoming a major source of human knowledge and opinion. As a consequence, we are seeing a growing need for a thorough multidisciplinary understanding of this type of communication that is significantly shaped by the specific social and technical circumstances in which it is produced. The highly participatory, interactive and multimodal communication is accompanied by the easily accessible and rich (sociodemographic) data, which open a wide range of new exciting research opportunities, not only in linguistics and natural language processing but also in digital humanities and social sciences, as well as bring about new technical, linguistic and ethical challenges for scholars.

In this talk, I will address social media as a catalyst of bottom-up communication practices that contribute towards the democratization of language and knowledge. I will also discuss the phenomena that achieve the opposite effect.