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Showing posts from July, 2023

Decoding NHS’s tweets with speech act theory and the encoding/decoding model

 In the era of social media, organizations like the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust are leveraging platforms like Twitter to communicate with publics in multifaceted ways. A fascinating case in point is how the NHS trust used Twitter to communicate about  #GeordieHospital, a documentary series  filmed on various of its premises and broadcast on Channel 4. Analysing these tweets through the lens of speech act theory is a fascinating if laborious task which is of value to tackle one of the many challenges of understanding human communication in the digital age. NHS digital speech acts are multifunctional ( created via OpenArt ) Breaking tweets into speech acts Speech act theory, a cornerstone of linguistic philosophy, breaks down communication into three types of acts: locutionary (the act of saying something), illocutionary (the intent behind saying something), and perlocutionary (the effect of saying something). In the context of the NHS trust's tweets, these act