The Digital Resemiotization of Social Practices – Some Principles and Some Pathways for the Social Semiotic Study of Social Media

Interpreting friendship as a social practice, and Facebook as one of the outcomes of the contemporary resemiotization of this practice, the paper will argue for an approach that foregrounds both the cultural context, in this case the social and cultural transformation of friendship over the past 150 years, and the semiotic resources that enable new forms of friendship in social media, creating, in the process, new configurations of text and context of situation.