Digital practice as discriminatory discourse

Abstract

This chapter incorporates and draws on the concept of affect to examine how users’ discursive practices are reshaped by the design of interactive digital platforms. An affective critical discourse analysis approach is developed to analyse the affective-discursive loop by using Internet users’ practice of regional discriminatory discourses against Henan people as a case study. Through a comparison between users’ differing practices on two major Chinese news portals – Tencent and NetEase – this chapter reveals the extent to which regional discrimination is amplified by the locative IP-address function of NetEase news portal’s user commentary system. This chapter makes a methodological contribution in response to the CDS notion of discursive power in the digital realm.