mediated world.

Discourses tend to be intertextual and interdiscursive (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 39). They interlink various texts, discourses and contexts. Social media data are therefore not independent from other media but tend to be multimodal and connected with texts in traditional media. An example is that many political tweets tend to link to articles in the online versions of mainstream newspapers. Studying social media therefore does not substitute the study of other media but often requires studying various media’s intercon-nection. Discourses are texts that stand in particular societal, political-economic, histori-cal, cultural contexts. Understanding them requires taking a holistic point of view, that is, to situate them in history and society.

Earlier communication tools enabled individuals to create a private list ofcontacts (for instance a buddy list on instant messaging), to establish a group of contactsthat were shared by others (such as a listserv membership list), or to publish a list ofrelated links (such as a blogroll), but SNSs extended the practice of creating a publiclyvisible, personally curated list of contacts and made it a mainstream practice.