The Discourse Behind Textual and Visual Representations of Mindfulness on Twitter

Sammanfattning: Our study is a collaborative dissertation paper that combines two differentdiscourse analyses, textual and visual, based on a common theoretical background.The introduction guides the reader through the content of the study, at the same timeoffering a brief context of research. The aim of the paper is to address a gap that weidentified in the study of mindfulness, namely a critical approach, from a media andcommunication perspective, of how this concept is represented in social media. Eventhough our research questions are developed separately in the analyses conductedindependently, they can be reduced to three core questions: ‘How is the meaning ofmindfulness constructed on Twitter?’, ‘Are there any power relations in theconstruction of discourse and if they exist, how do they shape the discourse?’, ‘Howdoes the reproduction and circulation of discourse shape its meaning throughintertextuality?’For answering these questions existing research from psychology,sociology and business has been reviewed, with the mention that no relevantmedia and/or communication studies on mindfulness have been found.Therefore, our attempt to open a discussion in the field required a theoreticalframe of analysis. For that we chose Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, addingobservations on relations of power, and Stuart Hall’s theories of representation.The methodologies used for the two analyses are Fairclough’s and Rose’sapproaches of applied discourse analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) andVisual Discourse Analysis (VDA) are two detailed disseminations of qualitativedata, conducted separately. Results show that there is a mainstream discoursethat portrays mindfulness as a positive practice. This type of discourse might beinvested with power, however our conclusions in this sense are restrained by thelimitations of access to Twitter data. High intertextuality and low reliability onthe scientific discourse further suggested in our case that the understandings ofmindfulness are subject to change due to an advanced grade of interpretabilityamong Twitter users.